Barefoot Contessa Family Style

September 16, 2002
This second book follows the same basic premise as Garten's phenomenally popular Barefoot Contessa Cookbook: simple, elegant home cooking with good ingredients and a minimum of fuss. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to include ordinary chicken noodle soup and mashed potatoes and gravy in a cookbook, but Garten pulls it off with heart and style. Dinners are conceived as crowd-pleasers, with a big nod to Italian home-cooking: oven-fried chicken, penne with five cheeses, Sunday rib roast, risotto, lasagna. Like other cookbooks with a specialty-shop pedigree (such as Silver Palate), Garten's book is inflected with a certain catering mentality—a lot of salmon, sun-dried tomatoes, the inevitable Curry Chicken Salad, the forgiving and easy Chicken with Tabbouleh. However, these recipes manage to seem not dated but just reasonable solutions to the eternal problem set of practicality, flavor and time. With photographs of the dishes on nearly every spread and a nice, open format, Garten's book is easy to use. Sections on desserts, kids, and brunch complete this fine snapshot of real-life cooking and the joys of eating in.

September 15, 2002
Garten's first two books featuring recipes from the Barefoot Contessa, her gourmet takeout shop in East Hampton, NY, have sold more than 400,000 copies. Her latest repeats the appealing format of those titles, offering sophisticated but easy recipes and an attractive design featuring dozens of color photographs, mostly closeups of the recipes but including some casual shots of the author, friends, and family. Garten's "family style" cooking includes dishes like Chicken Noodle Soup and Parker's Fish & Chips (separate chapters are devoted to breakfast and kids' foods), but there are also elegant dishes like Tuna Tartare, Saffron Risotto, and Lobster Cobb Salad, not exactly everyday fare. Sure to be popular.

Copyright 2002 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 15, 2002
Ina Garten made her name as a premier supplier of prepared foods in Long Island's Hamptons' carryout "Barefoot Contessa." Her latest cookbook continues the traditions of her earlier work. In "Barefoot Contessa Family Style," Garten serves up dinners centered on homey comforts. Mashed turnips are made palatable to even the fussiest eater by topping them with crisply fried shallots. Squash gets enriched with brown sugar and plenty of butter. Basil, cheddar, and ricotta cheese enliven otherwise bland corn pudding. For a patriotic party, nothing surpasses the sentiment of Garten's flag cake, with its precise rows of red raspberries marching between stripes of whipped cream. Blueberries and more piped whipped cream create a field of stars. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)