NO-FUSS DISHES
Lidia Bastianich keeps it simple in her latest cookbook
Cookbook author, TV host and celebrity chef Lidia Bastianich is one of the most famous Italian cooks in the U.S. She’s also a successful restaurateur, with eight restaurants specializing in Italian and Italian-american cuisine.
Yet when she prepares meals for her own family at home, she’s like the rest of us: She likes to keep it simple, with straightforward, no-fuss recipes that don’t require impeccable technique or fancy ingredients.
Take cannellini beans, for instance. Found in every classic minestrone and many Italian salads, the white kidney-shaped legume can also add an inexpensive punch of protein to a plate of greens or make a fish dish more substantial.
“They are perfectly good and delicious from the can,” Bastianich says on a recent phone call from her home in New York.
Using food right from a can or box (such as ovenready dried pasta) also streamlines the cooking process while eliminating the pot and pans that tend to pile up with scratch cooking.
Her latest cookbook, “Lidia’s a Pot, a Pan, and a Bowl” (Knopf, $30), hit store shelves in October. It has 100-plus homey and easy-to-prepare recipes that require fewer steps and ingredients than her previous tomes, but still deliver incredible Italian flavor. As she writes in the book’s forward: “Sometimes, you just want to cook something that doesn’t leave you with a pile of dishes.”
This is Bastianich’s 16th cookbook and arguably one of her most user-friendly, streamlined to be “as straightforward to cook as possible” and using a minimal number of pots and pans. It was born, she says, out of her desire to carry on her relationship with her fans, many of whom love to cook along with her on her various cooking programs at PBS Food and her Youtube channel,
Tutto Lidia.
“I get this feedback, ‘You make me feel so secure in my kitchen.’ So I can’t help myself. I think, ‘What can I give them next so they stay in the kitchen?’ ”
While the theme of simplicity will likely resonate with home cooks who churned out three meals a day at the height of the pandemic, Bastianich actually started work on the cookbook before the coronavirus shutdown. But much of the testing with her daughter and co-author, Tanya Bastianich Manuali, and longtime PBS culinary producer Amy Stevenson was done during quarantine in her home in Queens, New York.
“I have a large house,” she says. “We opened all the windows and put the masks on and that was that. We worked around it.”
She chose to focus on one-pot dishes — meals made in a single skillet, Dutch oven, baking sheet or roasting pan — because the approach fits the busy times we live in. She also liked the creative challenge of creating simple, minimally messy dishes with layered, harmonizing flavors.
That meant eliminating as many chef secret techniques as possible, focusing on the timing and sequence of ingredients, and making cooks realize it’s OK to substitute different vegetables or proteins to accommodate personal tastes and budget. For instance, she uses cod in a seafood dish instead of salmon or shrimp.
It also required constantly thinking,
“How did my grandmother or mother cook for the family?” when she was growing up in Istria, a mountainous region of Croatia that was once part of Italy.
“It was fun to be able to use my years of experience in a commercial kitchen and traveling, and synthesize it down to a simple baking pan that everyone can relate to,” she says.
The journey took her at least one place she never thought she’d go: into the Italian food aisle for ovenready lasagna noodles, which she turned into a knock-out skillet lasagna recipe that comes together in about 45 minutes.
While fresh is always better, the process of making dough from scratch takes time and practice. Bastianich was surprised to find how well dishes turned out with pre-cooked noodles and shells, so long as you make sure there is enough liquid in the baking
pan for the pasta to cook in the oven. She stuffs them with three cheeses, parsley and scallions.
The chef also tried her hand at Instant Pot cooking for the first time during the pandemic, and gives tips to readers willing to experiment with adapting some of the cookbook’s recipes to the electric multicooker.
Almost all of the recipes can be served as a one-course meal. Many also could shine as an appetizer or side dish in a multi-course feast, or be portioned and frozen for a quick leftover dinner. All are Bastianich favorites that have their roots in the Italian cooking the chef is famous for.
Along with a chapter on eggs, the cookbook dishes up soup and salad recipes with an eye toward seasonality. It also takes a deep dive into seafood and unfamiliar fish such as monkfish, which she cooks with cannellini beans into a savory stew. There also are more than 20 meat and
poultry dishes.
You’ll find a wide assortment of primi pasta and risotto cishes, which are the cornerstone of Italian cooking and perfectly suited for one-pot cooking: chicken eggplant Parmesan, gemelli with pesto and tomato, chicken cacciatore and zucchini bread lasagna, to name a few. There’s also a recipe for pan pizza.
Ever the teacher, Bastianich sprinkles tips and tricks throughout, and also offers substitution and serving suggestions.
“It’s for everybody, even the beginners,” she says.
As for the cooking vessels themselves, the chef is quick to point out that her book takes an “expansive” view of one-pot cooking. Some of the recipes actually require an extra bowl or plate during prep, cooking or plating.
Cooking, Bastianich says, should always be fun, welcoming and delicious, as well as an expression of your love and affection for the people around your table.
“I see the connection when people get together, and feel nourished in every way,” she says.
She hopes her latest cookbook will help home cooks feel more comfortable in the kitchen while realizing that good cooking doesn’t have to be complicated. “It’s all about the comfort zone,” she says.