Barefoot Contessa At Home

For our first official week of cooking meals for this blog, we chose recipes from Barefoot Contessa At Home by Ina Garten.

Shari and I have decided we will judge each recipe on 5 categories: availability of ingredients, instructions, skill level required, taste, and miscellaneous factors. Based on these categories we will then either recommend or not recommend each recipe. Then at the end we will give our overall opinion of the cookbook.

This week we made:

1. Green Herb Dip

2. Roasted Shrimp and Orzo Salad

3. Crunchy Noodle Salad

4. Eli's Asian Salmon

5. Zucchini Pancakes

6. Lemon Yogurt Cake

Green Herb Dip:

This recipe called for all readily available ingredients, and is very short and simple. Skill level is pretty easy- it just requires a lot of chopping herbs and a food processor. If you don't have a food processor, I'm sure you could subsitute a hand mixer just make sure the cream cheese is room temp. I found this recipe to be a little lacking in something but I couldn't put my finger on it. Shari and the boys liked it though. Overall, we think its definitely a good healthy alternative to other dips but I still prefer ranch dressing :)

Roasted Shrimp and Orzo Salad:

This salad was the perfect complement to the herb dip because it used many of the same flavors! All the ingredients were easy to find and we had most of them left over from making the dip. The instructions were easy to follow and it was very easy to make (just make sure you don't over cook the shrimp!). The flavor of this salad is great, it would make a really good dish for a summer party or barbeque! Shari and I would DEFINITELY recommend this recipe.

Crunchy Noodle Salad:

This recipe actually did not come from the cookbook BUT it is an Ina Garten recipe and has a nice asian flavor that paired well with our salmon. For a side dish this recipe called for a LOT of ingredients! Although these ingredients can most likely be found in your grocery store (we found them in ours), they are not things you likely already have unless you cook a lot of asian inspired food. We estimated that this pretty simple side dish cost us $20 to make because of all the extra things we had to buy to make it. Although these noodles went very well with the Salmon, it is not our favorite noodle dish and we would not recommend it. The dressing that is supposed to coat the noodles falls to the bottom and doesn't absorb well leaving the noodles with a faint sesame flavor.

Eli's Asian Salmon:

Like the crunchy noodle dish, the salmon called for a lot of ingredients but we found them to be worth it. The instructions were easy to follow, although we did have to cook our salmon about 5 minutes longer than called for. We rated this recipe's difficulty as medium, not because it is hard to make but because the oven has to be 500 degrees and it is easy to burn the crust. We also made some changes to this recipe we want to mention. Mainly we doubled the chili paste and served the fish with lemon. Overall, we all thought the salmon was excellent (even Austin who does not like salmon!). I, personally, felt the ginger overpowered all the other flavors so I would use less but Shari disagrees. The salmon was cooked perfectly and very moist so we recommend this recipe.

Side note: Imran likes his food spicy so Shari made a little sauce for him to eat with his fish. (Warning: not for the faint of heart!)

2 tablespoons Red Pepper Flakes

1 teaspoon Red Chili powder (cayenne)

1 teaspoon Garlic paste

Dash of Salt

Enough lemon juice to form a watery paste

Zucchini Pancakes:

These were super easy to make and a great way to get your kids to eat veggies. The recipe calls for traditional pancake ingredients plus a little onion and a lot of zucchini. The instuctions were very simple and as long as you can flip pancakes you can successfully make these. We thought the flavor was decent but after the pancakes sat out for a while they got greasy so we probably would not recommend this recipe.

Lemon Yogurt Cake:

Shari and I have actually made this lemon cake before and it is excellent! Ina featured it on an episode of Barefoot Contessa recently and served it with a blueberry sauce, so we to give it a try again. The ingredients are common and the instructions are clear. The skill required it pretty low and the beauty of this recipe is that is DOESN'T require a mixer! The cake tastes great and the blueberry sauce is really nice. We definitely recommend this recipe! The only caveate is that the blueberry sauce calls for vanilla sugar which we didn't have and neither did our grocery store. We added a little vanilla extract to our sauce to compensate but if you are so inclined I know Penzeys Spices sells vanilla sugar or maybe it can be found in a specialty food store.

Overall all, this is one of my favorite cookbooks that I own. Most of the the recipes have pictures (very important!) and Ina uses very easy to find ingredients and mostly simple recipes to create very tastey food. I have made several other dishes from this cookbook and enjoyed them all. Especially, the Chicken with Goat Cheese and Basil. It has become my go-to chicken dish and I highly recommend it and we definitely recommend this book!