u/scrubbabby

The last recipe I’m trying from this cookbook, and it was my favorite. I definitely will keep this recipe idea. That being said all of the times in the recipe are off. It says to rest the dough for 30 minutes. Mine ended up needing an hour. It said to cook the pasta for 3 to 4 minutes. Mine ended up taking 12 minutes. I tossed it up with some garlic butter, pesto, and roasted zucchini, and some fresh basil and it was amazing.

This was a simple and delicious sounding recipe so I had to try it before I gave this book back to the library finally lol. All in all it was delicious, yet like the chicken Marsala recipe from this book I had to use my intuition a lot. Rest time needed to be an hour rather than 30 min, the water needed to be bumped up to 200ml and the cook time had to be pushed from 3-4min to at least 10 minutes. But! They were simple and truly delicious.

Made the chicken marsala from this book tonight, not the accompanying croquettes, although they sounded really good. I just did not have mashed potatoes laying around lol. I’m not really sure who does have them lying around aside from at Thanksgiving time. I ended up making some risotto with peas instead. :D
I digress, this recipe was missing some things, and as I read through this book more and look at other recipes, it’s clear to me that this book lacked a strong editor. This recipe was completely missing salt, which is something that every recipe should be checked for, it’s an automatic ingredient. It’s not that it wasn’t in the ingredient list. It wasn’t listed in the recipe at all. So if I made this dish as written, it would’ve been so bland. It has both chicken breast and mushrooms, two notoriously bland items. Regardless, after adding salt and adjusting the butter level, everything was really good. Something I’ve also noticed about this book is the overuse of fat. I’m not one to scoff at fat, I love buttery, olive oily, creamy dishes, but there is no way this recipe needed a half a cup of olive oil and 6 tablespoons of butter. It literally would’ve been sopping with oil.
A few other inconsistencies that come to mind when reading this book are the amounts of oil in some of the recipes. Where it clearly should be a half a cup, it will say one cup or even 2. In one of the eggplant recipes, the photos all show breaded eggplant, but throughout the recipe, you never bread eggplant, nor do you fry it, but in the image, it clearly is breaded and fried eggplant.
I was surprised by this book. I thought a book with a forward by Martha Stewart and being on the Amazon bestseller list of 2025 would mean it was at the height of its game. But honestly looking at this book now, I’m really glad I didn’t buy it and that it’s from the library.
I’m using it as more of an inspiration, jumping off point rather than actually following the recipes, which is really disappointing. I’m an Italian American and it’s not always easy to follow the recipes that my Nonna gives me over the phone. She doesn’t measure anything and I love a measurement in grams lol, but I was hoping this book would be a helper alongside my Nonna‘s recipes. It’s unfortunately just an unedited mass of amazing sounding dishes, but written by someone who clearly is not a recipe writer.