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Buy the Book; Learn 2 Cook Recipes & also See Nice Woman. `everyday italian' by Giada De Laurentiis is a book I would very much like to praise, as her Food Network show is one of my favorites, just after Alton Brown's `Good Eats' and Mr. Food Network Italian, Mario Batali's aging `Molto Mario' which looks better after five reruns than any of the latest offerings from Emeril or Bobby. Like Rachael Ray, Giada has proven that she is not just another pretty face. She really knows her way around the kitchen and while I have immense respect for Rachael's theme of quick cooking by busy people, I really prefer the more ethnically themed shows like those from Giada and even Paula Deen than the shotgun coverage from Rachael. And, one of the reasons I am disappointed with this book is that it plays upon Ms. De Laurentiis' popularity as a popular show host with a very attractive face, cleavage, and body. For every picture of a cooked dish in this book, there are two of Giada doing something in the kitchen in a pose that shows off her non-culinary assets in their best light. And, with all these photographs, there are precious few pics of the dishes themselves. For example, opposite the recipe for fried calamari, there is a full-page picture of a basket full of lemons. Opposite the page with a recipe for grilled and peeled sweet peppers, there is a picture of raw peppers. Opposite a recipe for spinach and pine nut pesto is a picture of a wooden spoon with pine nuts. All very pretty and all very useless in conveying culinary information. The layout of the book in general is done much more for dramatic effect than for effective communication. There are many pages which commit the same error as I saw in Rachael Ray's latest book in that the difference in color between the type and the background was small enough to make the print difficult to read, especially in the context of trying to follow the instructions in the middle of cooking the dish in the kitchen. This would not bother me if this book were a superior cookbook of Italian cuisine. The problem in this quarter is that the bar of quality for cookbooks on Italian cuisine is very, very high. Food Network colleague Mario has helped raise that bar with his own `Simple Italian Food, Recipes from My Two Villages' which is a scant $2.50 more at list price and which contains many more recipes which are, on average, about as easy as Giada's and, to my mind, much more interesting to cook. The very simplest example of this fact is in the recipes for the simple marinara sauces from the two books. On the face of it, they are very similar in that both use carrots instead of sugar to sweeten the sauce and Giada adds celery, which Mario leaves out. Mario also uses thyme while Giada uses bay. Mario adds garlic and Giada does not. One of the most important differences is that Mario, in almost all his recipes, uses whole, peeled San Marzano tomatoes while Giada uses crushed tomatoes. One sign of the ersatz air about some of Giada's recipes is in her brand of canned tomato, which is named `San Marzano', but this is simply a brand name playing on the positive associations of this name with the rich volcanic soil in the San Marzano region near Naples. One thing that always puzzled me about Food Network celebrity books is that unlike PBS shows from Martin Yan and Mary Ellen Esposito, they were rarely connected with their shows. This did not make them bad books. In fact, they probably avoided this tactic to produce better books, as in the case of the recent volumes from Sara Moulton and Tyler Florence. Like Rachael Ray, Ms. De Laurentiis' book is probably about as close to her show as the Food Network celebrity books commonly come, and I think this fact adds value to the book by being able to recreate recipes you see on the shows, yet it keeps the book from achieving greatness by simplifying classic Italian dishes. And yet, this book is more typically a book of `Italian-American' recipes than it is of classic Italian recipes. This puts it up against recent books such as Rocco DiSpirito's `Rocco's Italian American', Frank Pellegrino's `Rao's Recipes from the Neighborhood', and Eleanora Scarpetta's `Eleanora's Kitchen'. All three are `Italian-American' recipes from professionals (Ms. Scarpetta had assistance from a professional cookbook writer). And, I think Ms. De Laurentiis' book is no better than the volume from chef DiSpirito and it is actually weaker than the volume from amateur Scarpetta. This last observation is based on the fact that Ms. Scarpetta actually gives more details in the same number of recipes in a less expensive book. Scarpetta's book is also printed in easy to read black and white! Part of my problem is that if I wish to make classic Italian dishes, I want to make classic Italian dishes, not a Cliff Notes version of the classic Italian dishes. Ms. De Laurentiis' recipe for chicken saltimbocca is a perfect case in point. I suspect Giada gives us a very Americanized version of this dish, as virtually every source for the Roman recipe which claims to be authentic has sage, but no spinach and no chicken broth. And, why give us this chicken version with the complaint that the veal is too expensive against the spinach, when the classic recipe doesn't include spinach. In fact, Lydia Bastianich gives us the Americanized version of saltimbocca with spinach and VEAL, while David Downie's recipe in `Cooking the Roman Way' has veal, but no spinach and no chicken stock. If you are a big fan, as I am, of Ms. De Laurentiis' show, you will get a lot from the book. Otherwise, you are much better served with simple Italian style recipes from other books I mentioned or from Jamie Oliver or River Café cookbooks.