Fantastico or Joy of Drinking

Fantastico!: Little Italian Plates and Antipasti from Rick Tramonto's Kitchen

Author: Rick Tramonto

Rick Tramonto, one of America’s most renowned and award-winning chefs and author of Amuse-Bouche, among other titles, now has written a cookbook showcasing the best of Italian cuisine, the food he grew up eating and has explored in depth on his extensive travels throughout the country. The little plates in Fantastico! are all tempting, tasty dishes that can be mixed and matched for relaxed cooking and dining in true Italian style..
Italians have traditionally enjoyed this small-plate way of eating and now Americans have caught on. Increasingly, restaurants specializing in this kind of experience have been opening across the country. With Fantastico! fans of Italian food have the opportunity to reproduce at home the irresistible dishes served at enotecas, osterias, trattorias, pizzerias, and ristorantes throughout Italy, for quick weeknight meals or innovative entertaining.
Fantastico! is the ideal source for a stunning array of antipasti, assaggios, salumis, and cheeses, the perfect accompaniments to a variety of wines and surprising additions to everyday and formal meals. Tramonto’s terrific recipes, accompanied by wine recommendations and his tips on buying the best ingredients, provide readers with the inspiration and the know-how they need to make a big impression by thinking small. The selection includes such festive recipes as Tramonto’s Razor Clams Casino and Roasted Medjool Dates with Gorgonzola, Bacon, and Toasted Walnuts; innovative ideas for grilled breads with robust toppings (bruschetta) and little toasts with refined toppings (crostini); an extraordinary variety of panini, along with wonderful Venetian-style,open-faced mini-sandwiches (cicchetti); and a delightful assortment of simple-to-prepare dishes—including a spectacular canned tuna salad with a caper and herb vinaigrette—Tuna Conserva Cicchetti—that will enliven traditional antipasti platters and serve as the centerpiece of a light meal for family and friends.
With more than 100 simple recipes and beautiful full-color photographs, Fantastico! will inspire anyone who loves the casual charm of Italian cooking.

Judith Sutton - Library Journal

Tramonto is the chef/co-owner of Chicago's acclaimed Tru and several other restaurants in the area, including Osteria di Tramonto and RT Lounge. Amuse-Bouche, one of his four previous cookbooks, showcased recipes for the ultrasophisticated amuse-bouches-essentially little bites to start the meal-served at Tru. Now he turns to the flavors he grew up with in an extended Italian American family, which he features in the little plates served in his more casual restaurants. The recipes are grouped into ten chapters, such as "Crudo" and "Bocconcini," and although they may be somewhat less rarified than the Tru amuses, overall they are more refined than rustic: Beef Carpaccio with Green Apple and Pea Shoot Salad, for example, or Grana Padano Flan with Basil Olive Oil. Full-page color photographs show off many of the dishes, and there is an extensive source list for ingredients and equipment. For most libraries.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgments     XI
Introduction     2
The Glory of italian food     6
Assaggio: a taste of something, a morsel     10
Crudo: raw, salted, and marinated     40
Bocconcini: small simple plates of quintessentially italian foods     68
Bruschetta: grilled bread with robust toppings     110
Crostini: little toasts with refined toppings     132
Panini: grilled sandwiches     156
Ciccheti: mini venetian-style sandwiches     178
Antipasti: little plates before the pasta     190
Cheese: the cheese course     240
Sources: hard-to-find ingredients and equipment     257
Index     263

Book about: Miracle Juices or Filipino Cuisine

Joy of Drinking

Author: Barbara Holland

With characteristic elegance and delicious wit, Barbara Holland, (“a national treasure,”—Philadelphia Inquirer) celebrates the age-old act of drinking in this gimlet-eyed survey of man’s relationship with booze, since the joyful discovery, ten thousand years ago, of fermented fruits and grains. In this spirited paean to alcohol, two parts cultural history, one part personal meditation, Holland takes readers on a bacchanalian romp through the Fertile Crescent, the Mermaid Tavern, Plymouth Rock, and Capitol Hill and reveals, as Faulkner famously once said, how civilization indeed begins with fermentation. Filled with tasty tidbits about distillers, bootleggers, taverns, hangovers, and Alcoholics Anonymous, The Joy of Drinking is a fascinating portrait of the world of pleasures fermented and distilled.

The New York Times - Robert Harris

And as you might guess, Holland, who has written a dozen or so previous books, has done impressive research on a subject dear to some of us — writers who drink. Mentioned are Johnson and Boswell, John Donne (!), Byron, Oscar Wilde, Evelyn Waugh, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley, Eugene O'Neill, Edmund Wilson, Thomas Wolfe, Hart Crane, Malcolm Lowry, Robert Lowell, John O'Hara, Kingsley Amis. And, of course, Dylan Thomas, who once defined an alcoholic as "someone you don't like who drinks as much as you do."

Holland has a light, winsome touch and is always funny. Here she is on Winston Churchill making a martini: he "poured the gin into a pitcher and then nodded ritually at the bottle of vermouth across the room."

Publishers Weekly

Holland, a prolific and wide-ranging writer (Gentlemen's Blood, among others), distills a considerable tonnage of fact and trivia into this casual, shot-sized volume, the kind once found in every libation-related library, tucked behind every bar next to the Mr. Boston guide and a dog-eared paperback joke collection. She has a breezy, whimsical style, perfectly suited to her swift romp across the histories and cultures of alcohol down through the ages. While disclosing facts about the drinking habits-and abuses-of characters like Mark Anthony, Samuel Pepys and Pope Leo XIII, Holland includes summaries of how various kinds of fermentations and distillates were developed, often accidentally, in cultures from ancient Arabia to present-day America, and in times from Ptolemy's to Prohibition. She includes several recipes for home-style "remedies" like elderberry wine and applejack, as well as diagrams and instructions for the construction of your own backyard still. It's the sort of book-length essay that makes a perfect Father's Day gift, with stocking-stuffer backlist potential in seasons to come. (May) Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information.