Category

Barefoot Contessa

  • Strawberry Shortcake

    Strawberry Shortcake

    “Whoah,” you’re probably thinking, “am I on drugs? What’s going on here? That picture, it’s so good, so professional, so unlike any picture I’ve ever seen on this blog before. What gives?!” I’ll tell you what gives: I didn’t take that picture! (Collective gasp.) No, that picture was taken by my new best friend for…

  • The Recipe Tweaker

    The Recipe Tweaker

    This morning I tweaked a recipe and I wasn’t even cooking. I was reading Twitter (as I do every morning after reading The New York Times, Google Reader, and checking Facebook) and I saw my friend Elise Tweet about her beet hummus. I clicked to the recipe (see here) and then I Tweeted to her:…

  • A Dessert Party at Ina Garten’s House? How Bad Can That Be?

    A Dessert Party at Ina Garten’s House? How Bad Can That Be?

    [Hey, this is Adam The Amateur Gourmet. I’m on vacation in Barcelona, Spain and while I’m gone I’ve asked some awesome people to fill in for me. I first met Jacob Strauss, the Food Network Addict, at the Miami Food & Wine Festival when I was hosting The FN Dish. Jacob’s a great guy and…

  • The Best Beans of Your Life

    The Best Beans of Your Life

    If someone asks my friend Diana what I got her for her birthday this year, she’s very likely to answer: “Beans. I got beans for my birthday.” That sounds like a negative thing, but in the case of Diana’s birthday dinner, it was entirely positive. These beans, like the beans Jack trades his cow for,…

  • Mayonnaise-Based Sauces

    Mayonnaise-Based Sauces

    Growing up, there was nothing I hated more than mayonnaise. NOTHING. The idea of putting mayonnaise on a sandwich repulsed me. It still does, actually. I mean: if it’s a burger and there’s mayonnaise on it, I’ll overlook it because it blends with all the juices and the ketchup and the mustard and makes something…

  • The River Cottage Roast Chicken

    The River Cottage Roast Chicken

    My go-to roast chicken recipe, that one from Chez Panisse (here’s a video I made on how to make it), is such a gut bomb of fat–and fat from just the chicken itself–that any roast chicken recipe that requires the addition of more fat (butter, olive oil) usually provokes my inner Richard Simmons who bursts…

  • Burnt Sticky Buns

    Burnt Sticky Buns

    What’s there to say when you burn your sticky buns? It’s a pretty unkind thing to do. On a Sunday morning, you pique everyone’s interest with rumors of sticky bun making; then you roll them, pop them in the oven, and fill the apartment with a wonderful smell. And then you burn them. What kind…

  • The Best Broccoli of Your Life

    The Best Broccoli of Your Life

    You know you’ve done something right with broccoli when the person you made it for describes it to someone else the next day as “better than biting into a steak.” Those were Craig’s words and they were a marked change from the first words he uttered about the broccoli, before he bit in: “You made…

  • Warm Weather Food (A deeply focused, highly intelligent, penetrating essay and not a review of “Sex & The City: The Movie”)

    Warm Weather Food (A deeply focused, highly intelligent, penetrating essay and not a review of “Sex & The City: The Movie”)

    This is a post about warm weather food only I just got back from “Sex and the City: The Movie” and I’d rather write a post about that. But I will be good and stick to my subject matter, albeit a thin subject. I mean, really what’s there to say about warm weather food when…

  • Smoked Salmon Dip

    Smoked Salmon Dip

    Cooking is a funny process. If I gave you a spoonful of cream cheese and a spoonful of sour cream and told you to put them both in your mouth at the same time you’d gag and say, “Sick, man, get out of my face.” But if I mixed that sour cream and cream cheese…