Aside from the Gourmet Cookbook, Mario Batali's Molto Italiano is the most used - in terms of recipes tried - cookbook in our collection. We must have cooked more than 20 meals using the cookbook since we acquired it last December. Some pages are already stained with grease marks. So far, except for or perhaps in spite of one outright disaster and two or three dishes we decided were "just ok", the book is a winner.
Our favorite recipes include tagliatelle with sausage, basil and sun-dried tomatoes (Tagliatelle con Salsiccia), "weeds" with sausage (Gramigne con Salsiccia), Pici with Lamb Sauce (Pici col Sugo d'Agnello), Chicken in the style of Canzano (Pollo Canzanese), the devil's chicken (Pollo al Diavolo), and T-bone Fiorentina (Bistecca alla Fiorentina). These are simply fabulous.
The total disaster I mentioned is not even a total disaster in the true sense of the word. The dish - green fettuccine with chicken livers (Fettuccine Verdi ai Fegatini) - probably tasted the way it was intended to taste. The only problem was that neither of us appreciated the sauce that was in-your-face liver. I love liver normally, but that was too much for me even. We'll never try that dish again!
I should add that the Batali could not have meant "two 28 ounche cans whole tomatoes" in his Basic Tomato Sauce, for the resulting sauce is thin and bland, even after more than an hour of simmering (the recipe calls for just about 30 minutes to reduce sauce to a consistency that is "as thick as hot cereal." In fact, it took around five tries before I finally got a sauce that befits Batali's name and I realized that the problem is one too many cans of tomatoes.
We are looking forward to trying the other recipes in the book. It's been fun - and yummy - thus far.
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