On Demand
Low-Stress Recipes from the Barefoot Contessa
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Ina Garten, the Barefoot Contessa, shares some elegant, low-stress recipes that can be made with easy-to-find ingredients – like mustard-roasted fish, easy sticky buns, and coq au vin. Her new cookbook is Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics.
What’s your favorite easy and elegant recipe?
Event:
Ina Garten will be signing books
Thurs. Dec. 11 from 4-6 pm
Crate & Barrel
650 Madison Avenue
NYC
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Love Ina, she and I cook very much alike, although we disagree about cilantro. If Ina ever offered the opportunity to cook with her, I am on Long Island and would jump at the chance.
One of my favorite, easy and elegant recipes/menus: Salmon filet with thinly sliced onion/tomato and 1/4 c sour cream--mix, cover filet with sauce, roast then broil for 10to15 minutes, serve with saffroned rice, and parsnips,carrots and leaks which are steamed/sauteed. Poached pears for dessert. easy and delicious
what's kosher salt? How is it different from sea salt
Celtic sea salt and fleur de sel are very nutritious - full o ftrace minerals - Morton's is very toxic. You can see them from the air in Brittany -
oops!!leeks....
Can Ina explain more about using Kosher salt--just use it in all cooking and baking exactly like other salt? How is it different?
What does she think of pop cooking as displayed in shows like Top Chef?
If you give up salt, your taste perception readjusts. When I moved out of my parents' house & started cooking for myself, I didn't put salt in the food. I was pretty poor (in my finances, not my cooking!) at first & had to economize severely; when I had a little extra money several months later, I decided to treat myself to some of my old favorite foods, like Port du Salut cheese (great w/apples). I was disappointed to find that they now tasted too salty!
Now that we know cutting down on sodium is a healthy thing to do, I'm glad to be able to say that your taste buds do adjust, & you can get used to it.
Thank you, Ina, for saving my dinner party a week
and a half ago. I purchased a beautiful standing
rib roast, opened up a brand-new meat thermometer
and prepared to cook. Alas, my thermometer was
defective. I followed Ina's recipe for standing
rib roast to a tee (from the '"Family Style"
cookbook) and it came out perfectly.
I love Ina!!!!! She has the best show on the Food Network, hands down.
In France you can't go wrong - everything is good, unless you go to the supermarket it's iffier.
Click here to print out a great safe seafood guide with excellent graphics that folds in your wallet:
(it's the best guide I have seen)
http://www.blueocean.org/files/Seafood_Guide.pdf
In the countryside the market used to be the big conversation in France
here's the list!!
from the Monterey Bay Aquarium:
http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_regional.aspx
you can also download a pocket guide, and there's a specific sushi list too.
What cookbook would Ina recommend to someone who would like to learn French cooking?
Ina mentioned bring out the flavors in food, what does she think of the Flavor Bible?
Her rice pudding recipes is one of my favorites.
Speaking of true, intense flavors, there's a Brooklyn-based chocolatier -- CocoaVino -- that uses a minimalist approach to tease out some really wonderful things from chocolate and figs.
For example, they do a bonbon with fig caramel, orange, and anesone that is just suberb. And their apricot and honey fig truffles make a great cheese pairing -- especially with a tangy chevre or an assertive blue.
CocoaVino isn't a household name, but they were in Gourmet last month, and also have been featured in Food & Wine, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, among others.
Well worth paying attention to.
It's unfortunate Ms. Garten wasn't aware of the rapid depletion of ocean resources. If there were only a few wild boar left on the land, she'd probably counsel listeners to try something else.
In the meanwhile, I suggest the Monterey Bay Aquarium's very helpful Seafood Watch Guide -- http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx -- for both your listeners' health and the dining for future generations. Or visiting http://www.oceanlegacy.org/ to see the havoc being wreaked with greedy overfishing.
Perhaps a topic for another program?
The Barefoot Contessa (love the name) made cooking sound like a pleasurable experience. I grew up not knowing where the kitchen is and so, for now, I find cooking a chore to be dreaded. I wish I felt otherwise.
And now I am starving for something =good= to eat!
Apropos of the comments above re safe seafood:
An important organization on the business side of sustainable seafood is San Francisco-based CleanFish, which acts as a kind of matchmaker between sustainable-practice fisheries / distributors and the gourmet shops / restaurants who bring this seafood to the public.
CleanFish recently hired an East Coast Evangelist -- "Evangelist" is the title -- who will be based in New York. So we might be hearing more about CleanFish in the not-too-distant future.
Ina talks about using good ingredients but I notice that she always uses commercial heavy cream which has stabilizers and other junk in it. There are some wonderful organic heavy creams to use.
http://secret-recipe-secret-recipe.blogspot.com/
i'm trying to find your shrimp scampi recipe fom today's show. could u plz email it to me thx.
It was disappointing to hear Ms. Garten's total and unapologetic lack of curiosity about any sort of cooking other than what she calls the 'traditional' kind. The sparse accommodations she made were in admitting she likes Panko and pomegranate juice. Leonard as usual asks all sorts of good questions, but Garten just sticks by her dogma of anti-creativity and anti-experimentation. 'I'm not an adventurous cook,' she chuckles. What a dulling throwback.
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