Feed your family like a Las Vegas celebrity chef with this cookbook
You don’t have to eat at an Italian restaurant on the Las Vegas Strip to enjoy celebrity chef cooking. Try this cookbook instead.
Over the years of eating at and writing about various Las Vegas restaurants, I’ve acquired a small collection of cookbooks by the chefs who helm them, mostly celebrity chefs with awards and TV shows.
I take these cookbooks home enthusiastically, fully intending to use them, but they end up sitting on a shelf collecting dust. When it’s time to make dinner for my family, I Google a recipe on my phone, or, budget permitting, we eat out.
With restaurant prices climbing faster than groceries—5.1 percent annually versus 1.2 percent, according to the 2024 Restaurant TrendWatch–cooking at home has become a growing priority for my family. Not growing? Our repertoire of recipes. Dinnertime is as repetitive as “Groundhog Day.”
I decided it was time to turn up the heat, turn to the professionals, and turn to a page in a celebrity cookbook.
After dusting off a few, I settled on “Giada’s Family Dinners,” an Italian cookbook by Emmy-winning celebrity chef Giada De Laurentiis.
De Laurentiis is a former Food Network star who debuted a new show, “Giada in the Kitchen,” on Amazon Prime Video on June 23. She also owns a restaurant on the Las Vegas Strip, Giada, at the Cromwell (soon to be Vanderpump) Hotel.
“Giada’s Family Dinners” is almost 20 years old, but the book holds up today by concentrating on simple, unpretentious Italian recipes for families. It includes everything from soups and sides to dinners and desserts, as well as beverages and menu planning help.
Apart from a couple of unfamiliar ingredients here or there, the book is extremely accessible to novice cooks. So far, I’ve only made a handful of recipes from the book, and I found them all easy to follow. I enjoyed making these recipes so much, I’m planning to cook my way through the entire book.
Best of all, while a meal at Giada costs around $100 per person, I spent significantly less than that buying the ingredients for each of the recipes I cooked below. I can’t offer my family the breathtaking Strip view of Giada, but none of us had to get dressed up or pay for parking.
Italian Wedding Soup
One of my all-time favorite soups, I typically eat Italian Wedding Soup out of a can (because I’m classy like that). I honestly never thought about making it myself, and yet it was incredibly easy.
Despite the name, Italian Wedding Soup doesn’t have anything to do with weddings. The term “wedding soup” is a mistranslation of the soup’s Italian name minestra maritata (wedded broths), due to the harmonious way the ingredients come together.
According to De Laurentiis, soup is typically a lunch food in the U.S., but the chef often ate it at dinnertime while growing up in Italy. Her mother’s Italian Wedding Soup was made with tiny meatballs, a feat I attempted to replicate.
While most of the ingredients for Italian Wedding Soup were easy to find at my neighborhood supermarket, and some I already had in my pantry, I did need a supermarket employee to help me track down escarole, a leafy green endive I’d never heard of. It turns out my supermarket doesn’t carry escarole, but spinach made a perfect substitute.
I tried to make my meatballs about an inch in size, and I mostly succeeded with a few slightly larger or smaller ones in the batch. I was concerned with the protusion of my less-than-finely-chopped parsley, but fortunately, that issue resolved itself when the meatballs cooked in the broth.
All in all, the soup took less than 30 minutes to make. It looked a lot like the photograph in the book, and it tasted great. I spread the eight servings over three days, and it tasted just as good, if not better, upon reheating. I give this recipe a 10 out of 10.
Chicken Marsala with Mustard and Mascarpone
I try to limit red meat consumption in my house to once a week, so we end up eating a lot of chicken. Chicken is also my protein of choice when I’m eating out. At an Italian restaurant, I often order chicken piccata. It seems to be a healthier choice than chicken Marsala or chicken parmesan.
While the latter two dishes are easy to dissect from an ingredient standpoint, I wasn’t sure what gave chicken Marsala its signature sweet and tangy creaminess (though I assumed it was something fattening). As it turns out, there’s a Sicilian dessert wine called Marsala wine, which is similar to port and sherry and is often used as an ingredient in savory and sweet dishes. The dish, like the wine, originates in Sicily.
The recipe also calls for mascarpone cheese, a sweet and creamy cheese that resembles cream cheese, but is (as I predicted) significantly higher in fat content.
Making the sauce was extremely straightforward. It started with sautéing cremini mushrooms, onion, and garlic before adding the wine, cheese, and mustard. Although the recipe called for browning the chicken on the stovetop, I opted to use the air fryer instead.
This dish is served with buttered fettuccine, an extremely filling meal. After devouring it at dinner, we reheated the leftovers on the stove the next day. It deserves a 10 out of 10 ranking.
Quick Marinara Sauce
Spaghetti is a staple at my house, as is tomato sauce. I usually opt for a jar of whatever is on sale that week. So I welcomed a chance to make it from scratch.
With a total of nine ingredients, this recipe calls for two cans of whole tomatoes in juice and seasonings you probably already have at home. Not only is it easy to make, but my family loved it so much that I might not be able to get away with jarred sauce in the future.
My teenager, who has the sharp tongue and discerning palate of a food critic, loved this marinara, giving me the nicest compliment a mom could ask for: “Mom, this is so good it tastes like it’s from a restaurant.”
While the recipe makes six servings, De Laurentiis suggests doubling it and freezing one or two-cup portions for use as needed. It’s also easy to cut in half and only takes about 25 minutes to make. Once again, I give this recipe 10 out of 10.
Rosé Wine with Fresh Sage and Lemon
We’re not big drinkers in my house, but I couldn’t write about a Las Vegas celebrity chef without mentioning at least one alcoholic beverage. I opted for the rosé with sage and lemon because it doesn’t take mad mixology skills to make, and it sounded refreshing for summer.
An aperitif served before meals, this wine is indeed easy to make, but there is a caveat: The sage and lemon peel have to marinate in the wine at room temperature for 24 hours before serving. I didn’t read ahead, so I was a little disappointed when I discovered the wait. But it was worth it.
Rosé wine comes in a variety of price points, but I chose the cheapest bottle I could find. I don’t regret the choice. Thanks to the day-long infusion of fresh sage and lemon peel, it tasted like a fancy cocktail rather than bargain wine. You could probably even use box wine if you’re feeling crazy. I give it 9 out of 10 (only because it requires planning ahead).
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