This recipe can be found in Back to Basics, page 126.
For dinner last week, I decided to tackle my first of what will eventually be many Barefoot Contessa pork recipes. To be honest, pork has never been my favorite meat. The texture, to me, is in between chicken and steak and since I’m not a big fan of steak (or beef in general), pork has always hard to swallow.
Continue reading “Barefoot Contessa 46 Herb-Marinated Loin of Pork”
This recipe can be found in Modern Comfort Food, page 58.
Wow! What a week it’s been.
As things are beginning to open up in my home state and more people are getting vaccinated, my free time is slowly beginning to return to a pre-pandemic state. While this is great overall, it means that before I know it, it’s Friday. Then I realize I didn’t post all week long. Oops.
Anyway, last week we had a few colder days combined with some rainy weather. Even though it’s April, the weather had me thinking, “Soup for dinner, soup for dinner…” late in the week. So, that’s exactly what I did. I made a soup and it was the perfect choice!
Ina’s Chicken Pot Pie Soup comes from her most recent cookbook, Modern Comfort Food. While I have only made a few recipes from this book so far, none of them have been short of amazing.
However, I will admit that I was a bit underwhelmed by this one. I liked the idea of taking puff pastry cut-outs to act as the “crust,” the soup itself didn’t taste much different to me than her regular chicken noodle soup recipes. I have found that when I make chicken pot pie, the mixture is a little thicker and has more body to it. For me, that makes pot pie heartier and more comforting. This soup, despite its name, still tasted and looked like soup. Perhaps it just wasn’t thick enough or maybe some of the flavors are off.
The world may never know!
Last weekend I had big dreams in the kitchen. My original post mentioned something like I would make three recipes all in one day. Well, that was a little optimistic. I only ended up making one (the soup).
But, the cookies I had planned to make are still calling my name, so they will be made today and I can’t wait to try them! According to the headnote, Ina says her Chocolate-Dipped Brown Sugar Shortbread cookies taste just like a Milano!
That’s reason enough for me to try them, right?
Dinner tonight will be of the pork variety. This will mark the first recipe I tackle under the Pork & Lamb heading in the recipe index. I am not a big fan of pork, but I’ve never had lamb. So I’m continuing to put those recipes off for as long as I can!
Until next post, readers!
I know this post is a little earlier than usual. But I’ve been having some busy days and I have to write when I have the time to write. So here it is!
This Friday, even though Spring has been here for almost a month, the meteorologists are predicting a chance of snow for my area. Yes, you heard me correctly. Snow!
To be fair, it is not entirely unheard of for Connecticut to see snow in April. It just hasn’t happened recently. Plus, we’ve gone WEEKS without true “winter weather.” So snow in the forecast has most people feeling a little bummed.
In an attempt to perk myself and my family up a little with the possibility of snow, I decided to make dinner for us and maybe even dessert. I’m not quite sure what I will be making, but it will be a main dish and at least one side dish. I will also try to whip something up quickly for dessert.
Come back next week to see I ended up making.
For those of you who are long-time readers of this blog, you may have noticed that the posts have been fewer and far between more recently. For that, I apologize. I hope that soon I can get back to my regularly scheduled program, meaning a more consistent, albeit not as often posting schedule.
Posting every day started to feel like “work” to me. I don’t want this blog to feel like work. In fact, one of the reasons why I started this blog was to have an outlet and something to look forward to when I wasn’t working.
That said, April will be a transition month for me and the blog. I’ll be cooking a bit less often and the blog will only get two to three posts per week. It will mainly be the recipes I made earlier or the week prior. An occasional herbal update will be included as well.
This recipe can be found in Cooking for Jeffrey and on Food Network’s website here.
Friday was another Lenten Friday which meant I had to avoid meat in the recipe that I made. Seeing as this blog is primarily an Ina Garten-cooking blog, this was somewhat of a challenge. Many of Ina’s recipes are not vegetarian, with the exception of her some of her soup and pasta recipes. Even the vegetable side dishes she has are not really designed to be served as the main meal.
So, it took a little work to find one that would fit in with the restrictions. Thus, I turned to Google and typed: Ina Garten vegetarian recipes. This helped and after combing through some results, I settled on a pasta dish.
Continue reading “Barefoot Contessa #40: Crusty Baked Shells and Cauliflower”This recipe can be found in Barefoot in Paris, page 82.
Last Friday, I made a recipe out of one of my favorite BC cookbooks, Barefoot in Paris. I’m not really sure what it is about this cookbook that interests me so much. Perhaps it’s the fancy food. Maybe it’s the fact that it allows me to live vicariously through Ina in Paris. Whatever the reason may be, the book is full of French-inspired cuisine that tastes great.
The original recipe for this soup calls for making pistou, which is basically the French version of pesto sauce. But it is March in New England, so fresh basil is hard to come by and what the grocery stores do have this time of year is expensive and doesn’t look too great. So, I decided to not make the pistou for this recipe.
Overall, this soup is basically a French-style minestrone. Though, personally I prefer the heartiness of a minestrone over this one. There are more layers of flavors in minestrone and this vegetable soup kind of felt a little flat. We had ample leftover and I found myself adding in crushed red pepper flakes each time I reheated it, just to add to the flavors.
This soup uses a vegetable that I’ve never seen in a soup before: string beans. It was a nice way to use this vegetable and spiced up the vegetable soup-monotony that I usually have (carrots, onions, potatoes, etc). Leaving the skins on the potatoes and using white potatoes give the soup a natural thickening agent, especially as it cools.
To keep with the healthier-eating plan that my family and I have been doing, I used vegetable spaghetti instead of regular spaghetti. As expected, once the soup cooled and remained in the fridge a few days, the pasta did act like a sponge and soak up a lot of the excess water. However, it seems that the pasta didn’t “bloom” as much as other pastas used in vegetable-based soups before.
Overall, Provencal Vegetable Soup is nothing to really write home about. While it is easy and can be adapted to use any vegetables you have available to you, the flavors weren’t really there for me. As is common with many Barefoot Contessa recipes, the heavy use of pepper overpowers the dish.
Look at me! March is almost half over and I realized I never posted the February Cooking Roundup! Well, better late than never, right?!
February was not as prolific for me as January was, but I was still able to make a few recipes. I am slowly but surely chipping away at that 1,056 recipe total! In February, I made a total of five Ina Garten recipes and two originals!
After taking the first week of February off from cooking, I made a wonderful vegetable soup that was my own original recipe! You can see how it turned out here. If you make this recipe, let me know how it turned out for you!
Next, I made another original recipe. This is also a recipe that I’m still working on perfecting. But for now, my Easy Sweet and Sour Chicken recipe is on the blog for all who care to enjoy.
The first Barefoot Contessa recipe of February came around halfway through the month. It still amazes me that I was able to get five recipes down in only two weeks’ time. This was Recipe Number 31: Perfect Roast Chicken. I still can’t get over the fact that it took me this long to make Ina’s signature dish!
Next, I tackled my first fish dish of Ina’s. The salmon was so tasty and will definitely become a staple recipe in my house! To go along with the salmon, I needed a side dish. After all, salmon on a plate is a little bland and unappealing. I wanted something vibrant and yummy to help enrich the plating of the salmon. Thus, I made Recipe Number 33: French String Beans. While the string beans are the pain attraction in this side dish, the peppers and onion help to bring the flavors together.
I rounded off the month with some comfort food! Banana Rum Trifle, which I’m still dreaming about. And finally, another Barefoot Contessa classic: Macaroni and Cheese.
I can’t wait to see what March brings!
Tomorrow’s Shopping List
This weekend, I am planning to resume the tradition of preparing dinner one night a week. Currently, we are in the middle of the Roman Catholic Lent season, which means my parents observe the practice of not consuming meat on Fridays.
So, my choices were a little slim. At first, I thought to myself, “Well, I can just make a vegetarian dish from one of the blogs.” But then I remembered that I skipped making Ina recipes last weekend. So, I forced myself to find a recipe that would work. But let’s face it, while I love Ina, she doesn’t exactly abide by the vegetarian lifestyle. So, my pickings were slim. It was basically soups or some large portion vegetable dishes like spanakopita.
However, things like spinach in puff pastry doesn’t have all that much nutritional value for a major meal at the end of the day. So, soup it is. And of course, I’ll be omitting all animal products. I’ll be subbing vegetable stock for chicken stock.
I decided to make a soup that features winter vegetables. After all, spring is just around the corner! And soon we will be saying “bye bye” to squashes and potatoes in favor of other vegetables like fresh, garden-grown peppers, tomatoes, and string beans. So, I’m going to take advantage of root vegetables while I still can!
Dinner Friday will be Provencal Vegetable Soup with Pistou. This recipe, if you couldn’t tell by the name, appears in Barefoot in Paris, which is still my favorite Ina cookbook. You can read the review of it here.
This weekend is also my father’s birthday. So I will be making him a cake. Though the cake will not be an Ina recipe, I will still make a blog post about it. I may cook an additional Ina recipe over the next few days. Maybe I’ll finally attempt one of her appetizers!
Until next time…
This recipe can be found in Barefoot Contessa Family Style, page 202.
I’m sorry that this is a quick post!
Saturday night I made one of Ina’s macaroni and cheese recipes. This one is what I consider to be her “base” recipe, as some of her other books features variations on this recipe.
This recipe, though tasty, may not be popular with kids, despite it being in the Kids Entertaining section of her Family Style cookbook. I think it’s the Gruyere cheese that will give kids pause. It has a taste that borders on being an “acquired” one.
Despite this, this macaroni and cheese recipe is quick, easy, and tasty.
