More yummy recipes from Ina Garten
Barefoot Contessa’s new cookbook offers professional tips and recipes for home chefs
“People stop me all the time and tell me I taught them how to cook, and it just knocks me out. I can’t imagine that I’ve been able to do that,” Ina Garten, a.k.a. the Barefoot Contessa, says with a laugh. “If you cook, people show up and you create a community around yourself. And I think that’s what we need to do in this world ... It’s really important to bring people together — and around a table with something absolutely delicious that’s familiar and comforting. I don’t think there’s anything better than that.” The lauded Food Network host and bestselling author has spent 40 years in professional kitchens, and 20 years running the now closed Barefoot Contessa specialty food store in the Hamptons. Over the decades, the self-taught cook has picked up innumerable tips and techniques from chefs that have the power to greatly enhance home cooking. In her 11th book, Cook Like a Pro (Clarkson Potter), she shares some of them, interspersed among her hallmark streamlined, approachable recipes.
From cutting a head of cauliflower from the stem end rather than the top — to save your kitchen floor from being strewn with tiny florets — to shaving Parmesan with a vegetable peeler to produce attractive curls for scattering on a salad, applying Garten’s “pro tips” can make food taste better and the act of cooking more efficient. “It’s hard if you don’t know exactly the right way to do (something),” she says.
“And if you do know the right way to do it, you feel more confident about your cooking. It’s like any hobby. If you’re confident about it, you’re going to do it more and you’re going to get better at it.”
Recipes excerpted from Cook Like a Pro: Recipes & Tips for Home Cooks by Ina Garten.