Tag: reviews

Review of “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook”

Published on by RJ1 Comment

This is part of a twelve-part series where I review Ina Garten’s cookbooks. Check back each week for the next installment in the series! The reviews will drop every Thursday afternoon at 1:30 PM.

We all love the Barefoot Contessa, also known as Ina Garten. The East Hampton, NY chef and lifestyle celebrity has been entertaining audiences since the early 2000s. But many fans of her Food Network show may not realize that she got her start as the owner of a specialty food store on Long Island. While the store has since closed its doors, the name, Barefoot Contessa, lives on through Ina Garten and her cooking show and cookbooks.

Ina Garten and Barefoot Contessa burst onto the scene in 1999 with the publication of her first cookbook entitled The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.

With a foreword by Martha Stewart, the cookbook quickly led Barefoot Contessa to become a household name. Within a couple of years, Garten’s cooking show began airing on the Food Network and here we are almost twelve cookbook later!

I would argue that this cookbook is different than the other ones in tone. It’s almost as though she was trying to impress her readers and live up to “The Hamptons” stereotype. The narratives are filled with pretentious sentences that I don’t think are reflected in her others books. It’s almost as if her intended audience with this book was exclusively for summer home owners on ritzy coasts.

Many of the recipes promote the “summer is perfect on the Hamptons” trope by mainly benefitting people who have grills or access to fresh seafood and local farmer’s markets. What is strange to me is I think if my first foray into Ina Garten had been this cookbook, I don’t think I would be as big of a fan. Granted, I have only cooked one recipe from this book so far (see here), but all the recipes just come off as too fancy and aren’t really relatable to me.

That said, now that I am older and have had more experience with “early Ina” I feel more confident with the recipes in this book. That said, overall many of the recipes are for more seasoned palates and cooks. Another difference between the recipes in this book and some of her other is that many of the recipes are designed to be used for entertainment, so the scale of the recipes is a lot larger (in fact, her first three cookbooks feature recipes that could feed a couple handfuls of people). Many recipes in this book feed 8 as opposed to the 4 to 6 that is common in the later books.

Some highlights from this book:

  1. Sun-dried Tomato Dip
  2. Gazpacho
  3. Grilled Salmon Salad
  4. Lobster Potpie
  5. Turkey Meatloaf
  6. Kitchen Clambake
  7. Potato-Fennel Gratin
  8. Outrageous Brownies
  9. Croissant Bread Pudding
  10. Maple-Oatmeal Scones

I can’t wait to try some more of these, however I almost feel obligated to wait until summer because the food just lends itself to that season.

Recipe #2 – Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars

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Ina’s Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars from Barefoot Contessa At Home

Last night, on a whim I felt that I was in the mood to bake. So, naturally, I chose an Ina recipe. I figured since it was late and a weeknight it would be best and easiest to bake something from the “Dessert” sections of the cookbooks. I thumbed through each of the 11 books I currently own, narrowed it down to three top choices then picked from those three.

And the Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars won….mainly due to the fact that I needed a limited number of ingredients from the grocery store.

After heading to the local Big Y, standing in line for almost 10 minutes while the elderly woman in front of me took her sweet time loading her groceries on the cashier’s conveyor belt, I started baking.

Everything was going well until I got to the part where I had to add the flour. Ina calls for 3 cups of flour for this recipe. I had the flour, but it was a new bag so the flour was more compact than usual and I think I added probably an extra tablespoon or two just because the flour was too packed in the cups.

This recipe looks easy, but peanut butter is hard to handle and I learned that cleaning up anything that had peanut butter in it can be challenging! Also, due to the my inclination that the mixture had too much flour, the dough itself was hard to spread.

It was more annoying than hard to make these. But after they baked and cool, I was impressed! They were so sweet and delicious and I doubt they will last very long in the house.

Disclaimer: I am not a photographer by any means. And I only have an iPhone 8 as a camera, so please bare with me on the sub-par photos.

Cheers!