Father Orsini's Italian Kitchen is a rare combination of authentic, old world recipes and an insightful look at the role food plays in our everyday relationships. Did you ever wonder what some priests do in their spare time? Here's one answer... Father Joseph Orsini, a retired Roman Catholic priest, thanks to his mother's expert guidance and advice, has become a cook of considerable distinction. Father Orsini's Italian Kitchen is a divine Italian-American cookbook. Inside you'll find 200 traditional, easy-to-follow, and utterly delicious Italian recipes. From pasta to soups and salads to desserts, Father Joe provides exciting Southern Italian and Mediterranean dishes taken from the homespun recipes that make up the foundation of traditional Italian cooking. But this is more than just a collection of superb Italian dishes. Father Orsini includes heart-warming anecdotes about growing up in a large Italian family in New Jersey, and many historical, philosophical, and theological facts relating the joy of cooking to the total human experience.

Father Joseph Orsini, a retired Catholic priest, has found his second calling in the kitchen. In this book, he shares his love of food and family with delicious recipes and delightful anecdotes. With chapters arranged to coincide with the courses of a formal Italian dinner- antipasti (appetizers), ministre (soups), pasta with an astounding variety of sauces, risotti (rice dishes), secondi piatti (main courses), and desserts-- this book is a rare combination of Old and New World recipes for such exciting and mouth-watering dishes as portobello mushrooms in garlic and wine sauce, linguine with mussels Calabrian style, pasta pizza, Roman roast leg of lamb, genuine eggplant parmigiana, and the ever popular roast stuffed turkey. In addition, because of the hurried and harried lives that most of us lead today, Father Orsini has included snappy, delicious, and practical recipes that make good use of the microwave oven. This cookbook is designed to be read as one would read a short story-- from beginning to end. The reader can skip the recipes and gain enjoyable historic and cultural facts about Italy. For example, Father Orsini gives a brief account of the development of Italian cuisine after the voyages of Columbus, as well as delightful histories of common vegetables and popular foods, such as tomatoes, potatoes, beans, corn, turkey, and chocolate. He also includes tips for cooking the perfect pasta, general hints for the Italian kitchen, and a list of common ingredients and terms used in Italian cooking. Once again, Father Orsini has written a charming book that will feed your mind as well as your body. You will enjoy reading this book, and your family and friends will appreciate the delicious meals you prepare by following these recipes.

Italian Baking Secrets is Father Orsini's sixth cookbook, and once again the reader gets not only wonderful recipes from the great tasting cuisine of Italy, but the "retired" priest's entertaining comments. Father Orsini knows how to make good food great, and his directions come with the bonus of his wide knowledge. The book begins with what to most of us is an amazing story: how the use of grain developed as long ago as---or possibly even prior to---the Neolithic period. Orsini tells us about the grains that were raised---and eaten---more than eight thousand years ago. Through charming and fascinating anecdotes, he lets us see the way bread has evolved, from flat loaves baked on hot stones to the myriad breads that have evolved in Italy alone---making our mouths water to hear about them. But don't let the author's charming storytelling keep you from his recipes; if you do, you will miss some delicious and easy-to-make dishes you might otherwise never taste---and once tasted, you will want to make them again and again.

Orsini, a retired Catholic priest, has found his second calling in the kitchen. In "Italian Family Cooking" he shares his love of food and family with delightful recipes and anecdotes. 75 line drawings.

Father Joseph Orsini, a retired Catholic priest, has found his second calling in the kitchen, and here he tours Italy to sample authentic recipes at the tables of family and friends. The delicious results are lovingly presented here. Father Orsini offers tips on the wines to serve with each dish, and where to sample the best food and drink on a visit to Italy.

It seems safe to say that most Americans whose roots are not in Italy consider pasta the foundation of Italian cuisine (with the possible exception of those who don't see beyond pizza). There's justification in that, of course: In Italy pasta is indeed ever present, in hundreds of forms, served alone and in combination with just about any edible meat, plant, or seafood one can think of, and with an endless variety of sauces, even one named for she who practices the oldest profession. But wait till you see the great dishes that Father Orsini has brought you from the farms and cooks of northern Italy, wonderful dishes based on--rice! No matter what you think, rice was not brought to Italy by Marco Polo. The techniques of rice farming (and presumably some seeds or cuttings) came to Italy in the ninth century with the Arab invasion of Sicily. Rice farming prospered against great odds, thanks to the determination and hard work of Sicilian farmers and the money of the Sicilian elite. And even though Father Orsini's own roots are in the country's south, he readily concedes that northern Italy has raised cooking rice to an art. Cooking Rice with an Italian Accent! will guide you through that art museum of Sicilian rice dishes, with everything from delicious soups (Minestre) to desserts (Dolci), a whole chapter on a fabulous selection of risotti (Risotto, that's right! How'd you guess?), and enough marvelous and often unsuspected rice dishes of many kinds to send you off to the store for a Great Big Bag of Rice. Father Orsini is an experienced cookbook author and an experienced chef, and his readers needn't fear that his recipes are difficult or complicated to follow. They taste really special, but the good father has made them as easy to put together as they are delicious to eat. The history of rice is a bonus for the intelligence; the recipes--from Minestrone to Rice Pudding--are the basic gift for your honest hunger. What more could you ask?

Now available in paperback, the acclaimed Il Fornaio Baking Book celebrates the Italian culinary legacy of both staunch traditionalism and irrepressible innovation. Over 70 classic and inventive recipes from the kitchens of Il Fornaio's renowned bakeries, restaurants, and cafes are interwoven with author Franco Galli's heart-warming family memories and fascinating pieces of lore. Find traditional and specialty breads, pizza, focaccia, and other savory dishes as well as a temptingly sweet selection of biscotti, cakes, and tarts--all with easy-to-follow recipes. Generously illustrated with hand-toned photographs, this great book--at a great new value--is perfect for anyone with a passion for baking.Franco Galli started his career as a baker's apprentice in northern Italy at the age of ten. He came to the United States in 1979, where he developed menus for several well-known California restaurants before joining San Francisco-based Il Fornaio America in 1987.

First in the series featuring the darkly handsome, proud, and arrogant Orsini brothers—the perfect Sicilian husbands—from the USA Today–bestselling author. Raffaele Orsini doesn’t want a wife . . . But when he meets his arranged bride, Raffaele feels honor bound to marry her. She’s not what he was expecting . . . but her dowdy clothes can’t hide her lusciously feminine figure or her wildcat temperament! Chiara Cordiano will not love her husband! She’s tried everything to avoid her fate, but in the blink of an eye Chiara is swept away from her quaint Sicilian town to New York! She wants to hate Rafe, but seduction is in his blood. With his dark, brooding looks and tempting masculinity, she’ll be purring like a kitten!

How is the meaning of food created, communicated, and continually transformed? How are food practices defined, shaped, delineated, constructed, modified, resisted, and reinvented – by whom and for whom? These are but a few of the questions Who Decides? Competing Narratives in Constructing Tastes, Consumption and Choice explores. Part I (Taste, Authenticity & Identity) explicitly centres on the connection between food and identity construction. Part II (Food Discourses) focuses on how food-related language shapes perceptions that in turn construct particular behaviours that in turn demonstrate underlying value systems. Thus, as a collection, this volume explores how tastes are shaped, formed, delineated and acted upon by normalising socio-cultural processes, and, in some instances, how those very processes are actively resisted and renegotiated. Contributors are Shamsul AB, Elyse Bouvier, Giovanna Costantini, Filip Degreef, Lis Furlani Blanco, Maria Clara de Moraes Prata Gaspar, Marta Nadales Ruiz, Nina Namaste, Eric Olmedo, Hannah Petertil, Maria José Pires, Lisa Schubert, Brigitte Sébastia, Keiko Tanaka, Preetha Thomas, Andrea Wenzel, Ariel Weygandt, Andrea Whittaker and Minette Yao.

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.