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"You feature foods from 12 regions in Italy, some of which I&amp;#039;ve never heard of. In my previous book, Lidia&amp;#039;s Italy, I covered the better-known regions \u2014 Rome and Naples and Florence, places like that. In my new book, it&amp;#039;s the lesser-known regions like Umbria and Abruzzo. I&amp;#039;ve been going to these areas for years, and they&amp;#039;re just magnificent. The beauty of them is that they&amp;#039;re tiny, but the food is so different from town to town. There&amp;#039;s an amazing variety of regional foods for a little country that&amp;#039;s smaller than California. But these are pretty simple dishes. I zero in on the straightforward recipes. I choose them because they&amp;#039;re the dishes that most exemplify place. I bring the flavor of these regions home to you. So you&amp;#039;re in some tiny town, and you find the best recipes...how? The people. I&amp;#039;ll go to the butcher and I&amp;#039;ll see some great sausages. Then the butcher will say, &amp;#039;Oh, my wife makes it this way.&amp;#039; So I&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;#039;Take me to your wife!&amp;#039; And I&amp;#039;ll go to their house and she&amp;#039;ll show me. Or I&amp;#039;ll go to a local bakery and ask about what they have. They&amp;#039;re really willing to share their food. I&amp;#039;ll stop women on their stoops and ask them, &amp;#039;How do you cook this? How do you cook that?&amp;#039; They&amp;#039;ll even start getting in arguments about it. That&amp;#039;s what I love. A real food detective! It&amp;#039;s the search for the ultimate source \u2014 people&amp;#039;s homes. The homes of the farmers, the winemakers, the everyday people. And the little trattorias that cook for the local farmers. They&amp;#039;re pretty much on target with the kind of cooking I&amp;#039;m looking for. Mostly country cooking? Good family cooking. That&amp;#039;s the idea behind a lot of these recipes \u2014 to take a simple, familiar dish, just a couple of different ingredients, and make it completely interesting again. For example, we all like chicken, but it can be so bland. So there are dishes like chicken with olives and pine nuts. It&amp;#039;s pan-cooked and caramelized. The olives imbue the chicken with flavor, and the pine nuts add crunch. Simple, and so delicious! You rarely use skinless chicken.  Chicken with skin is where it&amp;#039;s at. Don&amp;#039;t get too fussy about that kind of stuff. Just eat less and enjoy. As much as possible, you have to try and enjoy. True Italian wisdom! Ha! It&amp;#039;s true. The other thing I want to add: most of the recipes rely on a limited larder. It&amp;#039;s the best way to eat. Simple. In season. Americans are really going back to seasonal ingredients. You also say, Waste not, want not. Nothing goes to waste, including water. You use the same water in which vegetables are cooked to cook the pasta that follows, then you can use that water for making soups or risotto. You cook the outer leaves of cauliflower and broccoli, those kinds of things. You have a show on public television, six cookbooks, many restaurants, but what really struck me was that you&amp;#039;ve cooked for the pope. I cooked for him for two days. His mother was a cook and he&amp;#039;s German, so on the second day I made sauerkraut and goulash and all the things I thought he may have had as a child. And he said to me, &amp;#039;This reminds me of my mother&amp;#039;s flavors.&amp;#039; Emotionally it&amp;#039;s hard to connect with someone like that. But my food permeated him through his childhood memories. That was so beautiful. It was a career highlight.  Lidia cooks from the heart of Italy by Lidia Matticchio Bastianich and Tanya Bastianich Manuali is published by Alfred A. Knopf (aaknopf.com); $35. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.housebeautiful.com/lifestyle/recipes-cookbooks/reviews/a393/lidia-bastianich-italian-cookbooks/>