Cooking Italian - Brossura

A season-by-season look at Italian cooking, her recipes focusing on ingredients at their freshest and best, celebrated chef Valentina Harris offers a contemporary selection of Italian recipes. Beautifully photographed, the recipes are simple to make and tasty, redolent of Italy, the Italians and their easy, care-free lifestyle. In Spring, globe artichokes and asparagus mix with fontina and parmesan, freshly made ricotta with spinach. Summer offers a plethora of fresh produce from courgettes to new potatoes, tomatoes to pesto. Autumn and its glut of produce brings peppers and aubergines alongside freshly picked mushrooms baked or in a salad, blueberries and apples with honey and grappa. And Winter itself, often thought of as the leanest season, brings comfort with chestnut and porcini mushroom soup, cauliflower cheese with parma ham or spieced pandoro pudding. Brought up in Italy, Valentina's love for Italian cooking radiates from the pages, imbuing the book with her passion for this sun-soaked country and its cuisine and the stunning locational photography almost brings the country to the kitchen door itself. A must for all Italian food lovers. - Lucy Watson

Valentina Harris is a celebrity chef, author, broadcaster and lecturer. Her first television series, Italian Regional Cookery for the BBC, was shown in 1990 and 1998 to international acclaim, and she has just completed a new series for television, Tasting History. Valentina is established as a prolific writer on Italian food and cuisine. She is the author of over 20 books on Italian cookery including Classic Italian Cooking and contributes to many leading national newspapers and magazines such as The Sunday Times Cook's Companion and Insight Guide to Tuscany. Valentina is also founder and director of Villa Valentina Cookery Holidays Ltd.