'Tasty' delivers simple recipes for really good food

Tasty: Get Great Food on the Table Every Day, By Roy Finamore, Houghton Mifflin, 480 pp., $30

Lots of cookbooks make the same promise: easy, fresh, real, weekday food for everybody. But all too often, recipes end up taking longer than you think, demanding hard-to-find ingredients, or, worst of all, not really tasting like much. Those of us who cook all the time are like Goldilocks when it comes to these books--we sigh, maybe stick a Post-it on one recipe out of 100, then flip hopefully through another volume.

But Roy Finamore's ''Tasty" is the rare cookbook that does exactly what it says it will. It doesn't have a particular ethnic slant, but Finamore, like too many cooks to count, has an Italian grandmother, whose influence pervades some of his most successful recipes. ''Real good" meat loaf, made with Italian sweet sausage as well as beef, mushrooms, pecorino, and herbs, was so flavorful that the leftovers remained exciting two days after the fact. Summertime ragu, a quick alternative to time-consuming Bolognese, delivered the illusion of slow-simmered depth with ground veal and rosemary; it was outstanding with homemade ricotta cavatelli, whose silken texture was similar to, but easier than, potato gnocchi.

Alice's picnic chicken (as in Alice B. Toklas) was a hearty, easy dish for a crowd. But even with a big pot, it was hard to get a spoon in to baste the bird as required, and I can't actually see how the hot and soupy final results would be practical for a picnic -- but for a family supper, it got the job done. What with shelling shrimp and wrapping them, bacon-wrapped shrimp was a little fiddly, not for last-minute entertaining. But they can be prepared well in advance, and were delectably worthwhile.

Vegetable dishes delivered the same generally simple elegance. Lemon roast asparagus deployed the neat trick of roasting spears on lemon slices, which imparted their flavor with a sweet, caramelized effect from the high-heat roasting. Saffron cauliflower presented an apt combination of a few ingredients. While Finamore confesses a liking for well-cooked cauliflower that I do not share, this version was indeed capable of taking a little more heat without becoming unpalatable. His little fava salad was brightened with radishes, anointed with olive oil, and that's about it. The author understands that after half an hour of blanching and peeling favas, the last thing you want to do is concoct a complex dressing.

Even desserts are low-maintenance: strawberry ice cream was the no-cook kind, gently brightened with balsamic vinegar and pepper, a trick I'd never have expected to be so successful outside of a salad.

Instructions tend to be models of common sense, and Finamore's opinionated prose is fun (''There's a reason 'cooking sherry' isn't sold with other fortified wines: it's got more salt than the Dead Sea and is designed to teach children who sneak a taste behind mother's back a nasty lesson."). Cooking times, yields, and temperatures are right on the money, regrettably a shockingly rare phenomenon. In fact, long after I stopped testing recipes from the book, I kept cooking family dinners from it, because they were convenient and looked like they would work.

Finamore likes to say ''a meal doesn't have to be showoffy to be uncommonly good." Now, I confess there are times my self-esteem wholly depends on impressing guests with something I spent three or four days toiling over. But for the other 361 days of the year, this homey book will do just fine.