Top One Hundred Italian Rice Dishes: Including over 50 Risotto Recipes

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Summary: I love this lady's books on Italian cooking!
Review: I have The Top 100 Pasta Sauces and I think that it is a very useful book. We pull it off the shelf to make last-minute dinners from any vegetables lurking in the crisper and get a nutritious, elegant dinner in no time.

Now Diane Seed has written the Top 100 Italian Rice Dishes and I could NOT wait to get this. One of us at home had to stop eating wheat, which mean pasta, other than from special grains, was out. So we eat rice, which anyway I personally prefer.

Risottos are really wonderful but there is more than just risotto in this book. There are soups, cassaroles, molded rice rings and more. Some dishes are simple, some are quite complicated and worthy of a dinner party.

My favorites so far are the Rice and Eggplant Palermo Style, Lemon Risotto, Spinach Risotto and Pumpkin Risotto. These are healthy, vitamin filled and interesting dishes that are easy to digest. There are also lovely meat dishes, including a Sicilian Christmas rice platter that includes meatballs, sausage and chicken.

Many of the recipes specify Arborio rice. This is a flat grained, medium rice that cooks up rather like pasta (a bit al dente.) It can be expensive and hard to find everywhere in the US, so you might have to substitute medium grain Spanish rice, which is not the same. I sometimes substitute Thai rice in defiance of the recipe and it works, although the result is a bit different. The authentic Italian Arborio comes out moist and even a bit soupy at times. So if you can get Arborio rice, fine, if not, wing it and it still tastes wonderful.