The Italian Slow Cooker provides hearty Italian recipes designed for your home crockpot. The recipes are very straight-forward and utilize easy to find or already have them in the pantry ingredients for dinners that taste unbelievably rich and hearty. Be forewarned, this is not a "dump it in the crockpot and leave it" kind of book. The author makes the basic assumption that you are willing to put a minimum of extra work into your recipe to yield superior results. Most of this extra work involves browning your meat in a skillet before loading it into the cooker. I find this takes little effort on my part and adds a nice complexity beyond the typical pallid, uninteresting meat of most slow cooker recipes.The author has a variety of short tidbits to begin the book to get you started. She says the ideal crockpot for her recipes is 5-7 quarts. She lists what to look for in a slow cook clooker and gives you a basic explanation of what she considers "must haves" in an Italian pantry. Once more, no exotic or hard to find ingredients.Chapters include: soups; sauces for pasta; risotto, polenta, and grains; seafood; eggs, chicken, and turkey; beef, veal, pork and lamb; vegetables and dried legumes; and desserts. Scicolone begins each recipe with a brief introduction about her inspiration for it or a handy cooking note and quickly proceeds to the recipe. She is a very direct and easy to understand cookbook author. I really applaud her for making Italian recipes that do genuinely seem like the soul food of an Italian grandmother.Her finished dishes are handsomely photographed as well. We just ate her spareribs with spicy sausages and were blown away by the flavor--one caveat, try to skim some of the fat that rises to to the top of the cooker for a less rich and more tomatoey sauce if this idea appeals to you.The pasta sauce chapter as well as the beef, veal, pork, and lamb chapter are really getting our interest. I admit that the small number of pasta sauce recipes did reflect my final rating of the book. There are also numerous recipes for things such as polenta out of the crockpot. I can easily make such items in no time flat on my stovetop while I utilize the slow cooker for something far more sumptuous. I don't want to wander into the territory of having two or three slow cookers simmering away just to get a full dinner on the table although I admire that she adapted some basic dishes to the slow cooker. For desserts you need a 7 inch springform and a 6 cup capacity baking dish that will fit the dimensions of your slow cooker. I know most cooks have these items, but just be aware in case you imagine spooning cake directly from your slowcooker--it isn't going to work that way. Also, the paperback does not stay open on its own.I am so happy to add this to my cookbook collection. With fall approaching, this cookbook will be doing double duty. We are so happy with the results of this book that we will be buying The French Slow Cooker soon. Enjoy.