One of the questions people frequently ask me is ”do you cook every night?” The short answer is “no” but what I really want to say is ”define cook.” We certainly don’t eat out every night and even when I don’t cook a full meal, there’s almost always something to forage from the refrigerator rather than eat fast food. Sometimes dinner is a mixture of home cooked and store bought. And speaking of fast food, while I haven’t eaten anything from a large chain fast food place in over 2 years, we often go to our local Vietnamese, Thai and Mexican places which dish up a pretty darn fast bun cha, tom kha gai, or burrito mojado. That’s my idea of fast food now.
When I do cook dinner at home, it’s often something quick because, like many people, I work a full time job with a long commute. The last thing I want …
, Michael Pollan says “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” His theory is if you have to make the french fries yourself, you are less likely to eat them as often as you would if you got them from the drive-thru window.
, was one of the first Italian cookbooks I owned which talked about Italian food beyond tomato sauce. Giuliano Hazan has certainly taken to the “family business”; he is well-respected regardless of name, writing several cookbooks of his own, appearing on TV, winning awards, and running a cooking school for part of every year in Verona Italy. 
is filled with simple, elegant, and appealing recipes meant to be accessible to busy cooks. Most can be assembled in the time it takes to boil water and cook the pasta.
