Rao's Recipes from the Neighborhood Frank Pelligrino Cooks Italian with Family and Friends

With Rao's Cooks For The Neighborhood , Frank Pellegrino-of New York's celebrated East Harlem restaurant Rao's-returns to what he knows best: authentic Italian food. With over one hundred recipes and beautifully illustrated with both full-color and vintage black & white photographs, Rao's Cooks For The Neighborhood is Pellegrino's tribute to the place he grew up and the women who taught him how to cook. From Ida's baked chicken to Rose Milano's Spaghetti Frittata, everything a home cook needs to reproduce their favorite home-style meals is in this book. This classic cookbook is filled with newly discovered recipes of generations past, as well as holiday cooking, kitchen secrets, and some of the favorite menu items from Rao's. It's a love story devoted to Italian family cooking and its heritage. Every single dish is easy to prepare and satisfying to eat. Rao's Cooks For The Neighborhood will be eagerly awaited by readers who loved The Rao's Cookbook , but will also attract new fans who have come to know Rao's through the successful national brand of sauces sold throughout the U.S.

Frank Pellegrino is the owner and impresario of the restaurant Rao's. He also distributes a hugely successful national brand of pasta sauces and other products under the Rao's name (sold at upscale groceries and big retailers like Bed, Bath and Beyond). And he's a sometime actor who has a recurring role on "The Sopranos" (look for him more frequently in the new 2004 season).

Rao's Recipes from the Neighborhood is a tribute to generations of cooks and the delicious Italian home-style meals that are America's favorite foods to make in their own kitchens-they're also the kind of dishes served at Frank Pellegrino's inimitable New York restaurant, Rao's, and have helped make Rao's famous.

Richly illustrated with full color photography as well as vintage photographs and studded with essays on the great Italian heritage of home cooking, this book is an inexhaustible source of ideas for any enthusiastic home chef. With a full range of dishes from antipasti to desserts, this book includes the kind of recipes you beg relatives to write down, such as: Rose Caiazzo's lasagna, stove-top chicken cacciatore, Frankie's meatballs, Susan di Sesa's oven-roasted peppers, Rao's lemon chicken adapted for the grill, and Maria Pugia's biscotti.

You will turn to this cookbook again and again-to get ideas for a quick midweek pasta dinner with the family, for chicken dishes to feed a crowd, for holiday baking recipes that are simple to make and satisfying to share. Over a hundred years of traditional Italian-American cooking is behind Rao's Recipes from the Neighborhood and will make it a beloved favorite in your kitchen.