Note from Dad: Make time for cooking

By Joan Brunskill
Associated Press

A savory bowl of vegetable soup is easy to make with a versatile recipe from "Tony Casillo's Family Cookbook: A Treasure Trove of Recipes and Cooking Advice from a Dad to his Daughters" (Reader's Digest). Reader's Digest via Associated Press

Casillo's ideal is the kind of home-cooked meals he grew up with.

The book is "Tony Casillo's Family Cookbook: A Treasure Trove of Recipes and Cooking Advice from a Dad to his Daughters" (Reader's Digest, 2003, $30). In the dedication, he says to daughters Gina and Christina that after they set up their own households, he wants them to treat themselves "to decent, wholesome foods."

So he wrote down the recipes they had cooked together to help persuade them to make time in their busy lives for cooking family meals.

"Mostly, I'm trying to tell my daughters — and young men, too — 'Look, it's not that hard, in fact, often it's much easier than getting in the car and going out for fast food, and it's much better for you. Your daily food should be good, easy and quick,' " he said, talking by phone from London.

The 56-year-old engineer is based in the British capital as managing director of a turbomachinery-service company's operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Casillo was born in Naples, Italy, and raised in Buffalo, N.Y. Now an American citizen, he was 12 when his family immigrated to the United States.

He learned about cooking early in life. "Right from infancy we lived most of the time with extended family and cooked and ate together," he said. "Eating and cooking was something you did in the family. I think I sort of learned by osmosis."

They were not short of food, he said, but "you treated food with respect." Every night, no matter how late family members came home, there was a hot, cooked meal. Then there were the "festas" where everyone pitched in.

During one period when he was growing up, his mother worked, "so I tried to have a meal on the table each night when she got home, for all eight of us."

Plenty of photos of that extended family and reminiscences are woven into the book, among a wide variety of recipes organized into chapters ranging from appetizers to desserts.

Asked how his daughters Gina and Christina, now in their early 30s, came to cook, Casillo says, "I think what happened to them is what happened to me; they learned by osmosis.

"We always had our evening meal together, so they got to appreciate food, and they helped out at dinner parties, so they would see and share," he said.

"When they moved out, they used to call me up and say, 'Dad, I want to make such and such a thing — how do I do it?' We talked through ideas on the phone, and they found their own ways of doing things."

Now, through the book, he says, he's sharing what he has been learning all his life, starting from his Italian background, but including ideas absorbed from the traveling he does now.

The style of cooking set out in his book is more a matter of basics that you can vary, rather than set recipes to follow.

"The concept I want to get across is you don't have to learn individual dishes. What I'm trying to say to readers is: Take a basic recipe, like spaghetti sauce — if you know how to do that, next time around you add olives and some capers and basil and you have a marinara. But it's still the same sauce."

You could serve variations on successive days and not feel you are having the same thing over and over, he points out. The basic technique is the same.

Vary the dish according to what's fresh in the market, or what the weather is. "When you make a change, you end up with a whole battery of possibilities, without the pain of learning each time," he said.

He hopes readers of his book will be encouraged to go back to the kitchen and try this approach.

Among his recipes, Casillo writes about "a family of vegetable soups," which he refers to as "first-aid dishes," for when you want something hot with no fuss.

All you need is some pasta and vegetables, he says. The theory is that you use something, more than one thing if you like, from each of these food groups:

• Fat: oil, margarine, butter or bacon grease.
• Flavor 1: garlic, onion, celery or carrot.
• Flavor 2: parsley, tomato, spoonful of tomato paste, oregano or basil.
• Starch: potato, any kind of pasta, rice or barley.
• Legumes: beans, chickpeas or lentils.
• Greens: lettuce, spinach, chard, kale, cabbage or whatever else you have.

Here's one version to get you started. The beans called for can be white (cannelini or navy), red (pinto, pink or red) or black.

Clean-the-Larder Soup

• 1/4 cup olive or sunflower oil
• 1 medium onion, chopped
• 1 medium tomato, chopped
• 1 medium potato, peeled and cubed
• Handful spaghetti, broken up
• Handful penne pasta
• 16-ounce can beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 handful salad greens
• 4 cups water, or more as needed
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Heat the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed saucepan over high heat. Add the onion and saute until soft, about 5 minutes. Stir in the remaining ingredients and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat, cover, and simmer until the potato is tender and the pasta is firm-tender, about 30 minutes. Add more water if necessary.

Makes 4 servings.