By Joan Brunskill
The Associated Press

Dedicating a cookbook to his daughters doesn't reflect the limits of Tony Casillo's fatherly feelings. When you publish such a book, you clearly have a paternal concern in seeing that everyone is well fed.

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; $30). In the dedication, he says to daughters Gina and Christina that after they set up their own households, he wanted 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.' " The 56-year-old engineer was born in Naples, Italy. He was 12 when his family immigrated to the United States, where he grew up in Buffalo, N.Y.

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 they came in, there was a hot, cooked meal.

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."

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.

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.

• 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, escarole, spinach, Swiss chard, kale, cabbage, endive, turnip tops, radish tops or celery leaves.

Here's one version of Tony Casillo's family of vegetable soups to get you started:

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 borlotti 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.

Tony Casillo's Family Cookbook