Tag: vegetables

Barefoot Contessa Recipe 41: Salmon and Melting Cherry Tomatoes

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This recipe can be found in Foolproof, page 150.

Saturday was my day to cook last week. And even though it wasn’t Friday, I still made fish. Okay, I’ll be honest, we ended up not cooking the fish Friday due to our schedules. But, it was defrosted and we didn’t want to lose it.

Luckily for me, Ina has a handful of recipes that call for salmon as the main star. I was glad I finally got to make this recipe since I had been eyeing it for some time. Salmon with Melting Cherry Tomatoes didn’t disappoint. In fact, it included a few new techniques for me which was great!

The dish begins by having you render onions and garlic in some olive oil until the onions turn sweet. Then you add in some sliced cherry tomatoes and let those cook down for about 15 minutes. While they are cooking, some of they become mushing and split even further, which gives them the appearance of “melting.” Hence the name! Towards the end, you add in balsamic vinegar and basil and voila you have an easy and flavor-packed side dish.

For the star of the dish, the salmon, you start by pan-searing it in a very, very hot cast iron pan. Then the salmon is baked in a hot oven for less than 10 minutes. This was a new technique for me. I had seen and read recipes where chefs sear something in a pan for a few minutes, then throw it in the oven to finish the cooking process. But I never really had the chance to try it for myself until this recipe.

Honestly, I was a little skeptical at first. When I pulled the pan out of the oven, I didn’t think the fish was going to be done. But I trusted Ina and the recipe. After letting the fish stand for a few minutes with a tented piece of foil, it came out wonderfully tender! The simple combination of olive oil, salt, and pepper are really all you need on this salmon. The real flavor punch comes from the tomato “sauce.”

One of the things I loved about this recipe was the fact that it came with a built-in vegetable dish. So, I only had to make an additional starch to round out the meal. That dish became recipe #42, which will be published later this week!

Salmon and Melting Cherry Tomatoes. The couscous side dish is recipe #42.

Barefoot Contessa #40: Crusty Baked Shells and Cauliflower

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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.

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Barefoot Contessa Recipe #37: Provencal Vegetable Soup

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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.

Weekend Cooking March 12, 2021

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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…

Barefoot Contessa Recipe #33: French String Beans

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This recipe can be found in Barefoot in Paris, page 160.

The side dish I made to go along with the Panko-Crusted Salmon last Friday was something that took no time at all in the kitchen! Ina’s French-inspired French String Beans turn up the flavor on otherwise pretty bland veggies.

Sadly since it is February, I did not get the chance to truly enjoy the full potential of this recipe. I had to use frozen regular “American” string beans instead of the thinner, slightly longer French ones. But, I still think it turned out well enough for me to get a sense of what Ina was going for with it.

In the recipe, you pair the string beans with a mixture of peppers and a red onion. You roast the onion and peppers in the oven for about 15 minutes. I did this, but upon eating the meal I think they need another few minutes in the oven. The peppers were okay, but the onion could have used a little more “roasted” texture. To be honest, I’m not really sure what I’m trying to describe here. It seemed like another two to three minutes in the oven would have made things a bit better.

Despite this, the recipe produced a flavorful side dish that was pretty easy to make. That’s a win for me!

Ina Garten Recipe #31 – Perfect Roast Chicken

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This recipe is from The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, page 130.

It’s been a minute since I’ve made an Ina Garten recipe, hasn’t it?

In fact, I think this is the first recipe I made of hers in the month of February. Guess I won’t be matching or beating last month’s total of 8 recipes!

Anyway, I decided to make an Ina classic this time. In fact, I think many fans of her show would argue that this is one of her signature dishes. Roast Chicken!!

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Hearty Vegetable Quinoa Soup

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On Friday, I made this wonderful soup that tasted so yummy. An added bonus? It’s vegan! This soup is a wonderful soup to make because its essentially a one-pot meal. It has veggies, grains, and proteins all in one recipe! It will definitely save you some time in the kitchen while also ticking off some nutrient requirements.

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Today’s Snow is Prettier

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Weird angle was intentional lol

The snow is more fluffy today than last week. This is the type of white stuff that I like! Much easier to shovel and usually the storm passes much quicker.

Even though we are getting snow, I’m not making bread. I’ve done a lot of baking this weekend! I’ve been recipe-testing a new cookie recipe. It should be ready for posting soon!

Today, I’m making chicken soup.

The soup is on!

I finished the cutting prep for tonight’s soup! I’m glad I save the time now, so I’m not freaking out later. I can’t want to share recipe with you all next week. Now, I can start baking cookies. I can almost smell them already.

I store my chopped vegetables in a bag for simple storage and easy clean up when it comes time to make the soup. These ingredients will all go into the soup at the same time, so one bag is all I needed. Otherwise, I would divide the ingredients by when they are added to the pot.

Barefoot Contessa Recipe #30: Winter Minestrone and Garlic Bruschetta

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This recipe can be found in Foolproof, page 53.

Last Friday was really cold! Like really, really cold. Mother Nature was definitely preparing us for more than a foot of snow we got on Monday. But, with the colder weather on Friday, I decided that a soup would be the perfect dinner. Of course, I made an Ina soup!

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