My two cookbooks, La Dolce Cucina and Solo Dolci (the newly revised edition of La Dolce Cucina) feature a collection of Italian desserts from all over the map of Italy. There are over 150 recipes with chapters ranging from fresh fruit desserts to fresh fruit cakes and pies; nut cakes and cookies; ices and ice creams; mousses and souffles; and regional favorites from all over the map of Italy. These tasty recipes rely less on butter, eggs, and sugar than what you might have come to expect from European desserts; instead, they delicately blend fruits and other ingredients for an effect of lightness and subtlety. I’ve also included a complete chapter on Italian dessert wines with suggestions for choosing the right wine and the appropriate dessert for special occasions. Best of all, the books allow cooks to end every Italian meal with style, beauty, and flavor, drawing on Italian traditions that go back to Etruscan times as well as on contemporary inventions of today's finest Italian chefs.
Anna, the Expert Gardner – Anna’s Farm, or the Italian Garden Cookbook.There can be nothing more satisfying than stepping outside your kitchen to gather fresh vegetables and herbs for lunch or dinner that you have grown in your own garden. In my upcoming book, Anna’s Farm, or the Italian Garden Cookbook, I’m sharing my hard-won-by-trial-and-error secrets of how to best grow the many new and old varieties of vegetables, then turn them into delicious, flavorful dishes that are simple to prepare, fat-free, full of nutrients and extremely tasty. They feature the most popular Italian vegetables – tomato, zucchini, pepper and eggplant – in such dishes as tomato soups, stuffed tomatoes, bruscetta, eggplant caviar, stuffed zucchini, and peperonata.
Four complete pages of line drawings of my daughter, Sumishta Brahm, a professional illustrator, are included. She could also supply smaller line drawings if requested.
