Viviani - Fabios 30-minute Italian: Over 100 Fabulous, Quick, and Easy Recipes

Over 100 Fabulous, Quick and Easy Recipes

St. Martins Press

New York

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To my amazing wife, Ashley, and my son, Gage
anything I do, wherever I go, any decision I make
is only to make sure that you guys will get the best life (and food)
that I can possibly give you.

This book is dedicated to you both.
Honey, please put it to use sometimes. Just kidding!
Ill cook for you till my last breath.

Few are the brave who helped me with this 30-minute journey. To John Paolone, my head of culinary, my chef Johnathan Lynch, and to Bambi Osaka, thanks guys for always making a crapload of dishes so fast and so wonderful that I am able to execute so many recipes in so little time.

To Matt Armendariz, my brother from another mother. Your amazing craft with your camera makes my food even more appealing, and your amazing heart makes every day working with you a pleasure. I love you, man. Without you this wouldnt be such an amazing cookbook.

To Mary Goodbody, my writing partner, because an intelligent person was needed to read over and fix my stupid English. And to the whole team at St. Martins PressElisabeth Dyssegaard, Will Schwalbe, Laura Apperson, and Donna Cherryfor helping make this book a success and selling millions of copies.

To Mike Langner and Michael Psaltis, thanks guys for always bringing good business my way. Keep doing it!

Italian food inspires me like nothing else, and yet you may wonder: Why another book about it? Our culinary heritage is so rich and so varied that I dont think there can be too many good explorations of Italian food. Plus, who doesnt like it? The recipes in this book are for simple, relatively quick dishes that American home cooks will love. I love them! And I now live in the United States with my wife, Ashley, and our young son, Gage, and cook in an American kitchen in Chicago. This means I know without a doubt that each and every one of these recipes works in an American kitchen with ingredients bought in American markets.

This isnt always the case with recipes imported directly from Italy. Italy is a country, of course, but its really a conglomerate of twenty-one regions, each with its own cuisine, traditions, flavors and local pride. We dont look for whats similar about our cooking; we revel in whats different. You can drive twenty-five or thirty miles in any direction in Italy and find a completely different interpretation of Italian cuisine. To me, this makes my country endlessly interesting but not always easy to explain. I have attempted to simplify some of the food here with appealing recipes without any sacrifice of flavor or authenticity.

Italians are known to spend a long time at the tablebut not a long time in the kitchen. Were always eating but not always cooking, and I hope that with the recipes in this book I will translate some of my Italian originality into your life. I will talk about how we prep food and how we create dishes, and along the way I will showcase some of the things we do really, really fast.

I want to give you the essence of Italy in Fabios30-Minute Italian. Im from Tuscany, an area that includes the city of Florence and is overall about the size of greater Los Angeles, and many (though not all) of the dishes included here reflect my heritage. When I prepare a meal, very often the goal is to spend three hours at the table, but not that same amount of time in the kitchen. I, like my countrymen, prefer to lay the table with an array of relatively easy dishes from pastas and soups to salads and starters and then invite friends and family to sit down and EAT !

I came to California in the fall of 2005 for a vacation. I was twenty-seven and didnt speak a word of English, but I had recently sold my businesses in Italy and was enjoying having a lot of money in my pocket. Id had a good deal of success in Italy with restaurants, a dance club and a bed and breakfast, and had visions of sitting on the beach in Malibu, sipping mojitos while I daydreamed about the future. But it was not to be because at about the same time, my dad had a business setback and I had to step in and help my family financially, which set me back pretty much to zero.

I didnt move back to Italy, though. Instead I stayed in California. In those early days, I was astounded by the scale of things in the United States. In Italy, I could buy a pint of milk and a single chicken breast in any food market; here in America everything is sold in large packages. What was I going to do with a gallon of milk? A package of eight chicken breasts? Nowadays I cant imagine getting along without Costco, but at first I didnt know what to do with it. What would I do with thirty-six rolls of toilet paper? But youre lured by the deals, so its easy to overbuy. And its why theres so much waste.

One of my first trips to a supermarket in Ventura County in Southern California, where I settled, was a few weeks before Thanksgivingnot that I had ever heard of the holiday. Everywhere I looked I saw turkeys, turkey pans, turkey gravy, frozen turkey, turkey breasts, and turkey stuffing. Americans really love their turkey, I thought, and made a mental note to put turkey on the menu of any restaurant where I might work. A few weeks later I returned to the same Whole Foods and there wasnt a turkey in sight. Whats wrong with the people who manage this store? I wondered. Dont they know how much Americans like turkey?

A year later I was working at an Italian restaurant in Ventura. William Shatner was a regular customer, and he and I became friends. When Thanksgiving rolled around he invited me to join him and his family for the meal, saying he was going to deep-fry a turkey in the backyard; I brought along a plump chicken. The actor set his backyard on fire with the hot oil and after we put it out, I roasted the chicken. It was delicious.

It wasnt long before the guy I worked for and I became business partners, found an investor, and opened our first restaurant, Caf Firenze. I have now lived in this country for more than ten years, am married and have a son. And not only am I familiar with American supermarkets, I now appreciate them. Italy is my homeland, but these days, America is my home.