CUISINE REVIEW: The Barefoot Contessa at Home - Ina Garten

Release Date: 04/08/11

SYNOPSIS:

In Barefoot Contessa at Home, Ina shares the recipes she loves, and her secrets to making guests feel welcome and comfortable. Here she offers the recipes she makes over and over again because they’re easy, they work, and they’re universally loved.

·For a leisurely Sunday breakfast, she has Easy Cheese Danishes or Breakfast Fruit Crunch to serve with the perfect Spicy Bloody Mary.

·For lunch, she has classics with a twist, such as Tomato, Mozarella and Pesto Panini and Old-Fashioned Potato salad, which are simply delicious.

·Then there are Ina’s homey dinners – from her own version of loin of pork stuffed with sautéed fennel to the exotic flavours of Eli’s Asian Salmon.

·And there are outrageously luscious sweets like Peach and Blueberry Crumble and Pumpkin Mousse Parfait.

Ina also lets readers in on her time-tested strategies for cooking and entertaining - from what she considers when she’s designing a kitchen, to menu-planning basics. In this beautifully illustrated book, Ina Garten proves beyond a shadow of doubt that there truly is no place like home.


REVIEW:

Whilst I’m a Brit through and through, growing up I was raised on all manner of continental cuisine from a homemade curry using authentic spices through to traditional cuisine and fell in love with Italian food when I spent a good few of my teenage years working for an Italian Restaurant in my home town. What the Barefoot Contessa does for me is take me back to some of those roots and helps bring some of attention to detail alongside to adding passion into cooking from scratch.

Add to this a whole host of recipes that will take you on a journey but ones that also show that shop bought can easily be beaten by good kitchen knowhow and someone to show you the ropes. The recipes within are easy to follow, have great flavours and when you add to the whole process recipes that can be done in a quick fashion that concentrates of the meal star then you know that the content and style within is going to be a sheer delight. Cracking.