As the end of the year draws close, new cookbooks are being published thick and fast. Here's the skinny on three of my Italian favorites.

Urban Italian
Andrew Carmellini
List Price: $35.00
Price at Amazon.com: $23.10
You Save: $11.90
Click Here to Buy It Online!

This is how he describes it. "A couple of years back, I was between restaurant gigs and, for pretty much the first time in my life, actually found myself cooking at home every night: no prep guys, no purveyor deliveries, no pro kitchen, just me lugging stuff home from the market and cooking dinner in my tiny NYC apartment kitchen. I did a lot of Italian cooking-NYC-style. That's what Urban Italian is about. It's written with my wife, Gwen Hyman, who writes about food and culture, and it's full of actual workable recipes, plus some crazy true-life stories about my cooking life.

This isn't one of those fancy chef books you can't actually cook from in a real kitchen without a crew or special equipment: Gwen's no chef, but she can make every one of these recipes, and if she can do it, so can you."

Carmellini does a nice job with this, his first book. The recipes are simple but flavor packed. You can find out more about him at his website www.andrewcarmellini.com and buy his book online…

II Viaggio Di Vetri: A Culinary Journey
Marc Vetri
List Price: $40.00
Price at Amazon.com: $26.40
You Save: $13.60
Click Here to Buy It Online!

Philadelphia enjoys one of the country's most dynamic food scenes, and Marc Vetri is its top culinary talent. Mario Batali called Vetri Ristorante "possibly the best Italian restaurant on the East Coast." Vetri's refined rustic-Italian cuisine is on brilliant display in IL VIAGGIO DI VETRI. The recipes showcase the chef's soulful renditions of Italian classics, and accompanying notes by sommelier Jeff Benjamin offer lively lessons on the classic and lesser-known wines of the region. Throughout, Vetri shares tales of his cooking apprenticeship in northern Italy and shows how to bring the lessons he learned there into the home kitchen.