Summer Barbecue

Here in Minnesota, the summers are short, but beautiful and comfortable.  We try to squeeze in as many cookouts, outdoor activities, and casual entertaining opportunities as we can before the leaves start to fall.  Last week, we had a casual cookout with burgers, beans, and these beauties.

The crudite platter, which doesn’t exactly resemble the one in The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, but isn’t it gorgeous?

Those are purple carrots from our CSA.  They are a deep red/purple on the outside, and light orange on the inside.  My 3-year-old thinks this is hilarious.

We also made the tarragon potato salad from Barefoot Contessa:  How Easy is That?

The best part about this cookout is that we got to spend some time with wonderful friends, whose family includes a few hungry teenage boys.  I love feeding hungry kids!

There’s No Place Like Home for the Hollandaise

The fact that I made homemade hollandaise sauce (well, along with the fact that I birthed his child) pretty much secures that I am indispensable to my husband.  Asparagus with Hollandaise (Barefoot in Paris) looks, smells, and tastes like Spring to me.  I’d never made it before, and it was surprisingly easy.  We have a friend (whose name I will protect) who pretends not to know how to cook, but whips up a fantastic hollandaise for every holiday meal, and I will always think of her when I make this.

Provençal Vegetable Soup

This recipe (Barefoot in Paris) was a great way to get a great serving of vegetables in the middle of winter, and it also served me by helping me to clean out the freezer.  There are a few things that separate this from ordinary vegetable soup:  it includes pistou (like pesto), and it contains both potatoes and pasta, so it’s a bit on the starchy side.  I used frozen CSA green beans in place of haricots verts, so this was probably a little more sloppy than it should have been, but I didn’t mind.  I used yellow potatoes, which may have added to the starchiness, but either the potatoes or the noodles could have been eliminated if you didn’t want that much starch.  Instead of making the pesto fresh, I dug out some beautiful arugula pesto that I made from our CSA arugula last summer.  I mixed it with some tomato paste (also from the freezer!) to make the pistou.  Just a little bit of the pistou gave the soup a great flavor, and I’ll definitely use that trick again.

I found some great rosemary ciabatta rolls in the freezer section of the grocery store, which rounded this out nicely, along with the Chive Risotto Cakes.

Lentil Vegetable Soup

Lentil Vegetable Soup (Barefoot Contessa Cookbook) is the perfect New Year’s Resolution meal:  it’s inexpensive (budget resolution), it’s ridiculously healthy (weight loss resolution), and it can use up vegetables that have been lingering in the refrigerator (organization resolution).  Besides, it’s warm and comforting, and dried lentils don’t take nearly as long to cook as dried beans.  I can’t feel too virtuous, what with fish and chips and all the other butter-laden goodness that’s come out of our kitchen lately, but I figure that this and the steel-cut oatmeal I down almost every morning, I might be starting to make up for some of the other indulgences.  I love cumin, but I know some of my friends aren’t crazy about it:  if you’re one of those unfortunate souls, try substituting mild chili powder and/or paprika instead.

Sauteed Carrots

I’m so sorry for the recent hiatus.  I’ve been cooking, but using up things in the freezer instead of delving into the Contessa cookbooks.  Back to work!  I re-watched Julie & Julia last night, and I was inspired once again by this challenge.   The movie not only inspired me, but it also made me grateful that I won’t be cooking any aspics for this project, nor do I have to seek out any odd organ meats.  Thank you kindly, Ms. Garten.

So, easing back into things, I bring you sauteed carrots (Barefoot Contessa Family Style).  This recipe was a staple in our CSA rotation last summer, as it is easy and does not require a lot of time or ingredients.  The recipe brings out the natural sweetness in the carrots, but it’s a little more flavorful than a simple steaming.  Because I actually like carrots, there’s no way a can of condensed tomato soup is coming near them in my house.  I suppose I like carrots simply prepared because my grandmother fed us so many vegetables straight from her garden.  (Incidentally, she also thought that it was sacrilege to peel, or even wash, most vegetables, for fear of stripping them of their vital nutrients, but I don’t often take things that far.)  My younger brother once offered me a bite of his half-eaten, dirt-caked carrot, plucked straight from the garden, but I declined.  Later, he told me that we should all eat carrots for our eye health, because he’d never seen a rabbit wearing glasses.  I told him, as any big sister would, that that was quite probably the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.  Of course, he made sure to tell me the quip in front of our grandmother, who of course had told it to him.  Score one for Baby Brother and the rabbits.

So, for your eye health, and for your palate, ladies and gentlemen, Sauteed Carrots, early in the process:

Broccolini with Balsamic Vinegar

This recipe (Barefoot Contessa at Home) strikes a fine balance between those of us who like absolutely nothing adorning our green vegetables (me) and those of us who like whatever we can get our hands on to dress up our veggies (my husband).  The dressing makes up for the fact that the broccolini is still crisp, and it’s not so intrusive as to take away from the flavor, but it does give it a little something to make it more interesting.  Or whatever it is that dressing is supposed to do to vegetables.

Italian Wedding Soup

Christmas Eve at our house is a grazing event, and always has been.  I grew up in a clergy family and married into a clergy family, so we always have people coming and going at odd hours, and needing a little bite to eat on their way out the door, or after shoveling, or between toy assembling sessions.  This soup fits the bill nicely, and it even made a nice Christmas Day lunch before the gorge-fest later in the evening.  I like that it’s a little bit light and has lots of veggies in it, since I’m always paranoid about getting sick this time of year.  The recipe (Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics) calls for making 40 meatballs, but I only made two dozen large meatballs, because the meat mixture was so sticky that I couldn’t separate them very well.  They turned out fine, and actually didn’t take any longer to cook than the recommended time for the smaller meatballs.

Lentil Soup with Sausage

Hearty soup on a cold winter’s night?  Don’t mind if I do!  This soup was so tasty, and not at all intimidating to cook, even though it’s from Barefoot in Paris (pp. 90-91).  The hardest work, as with any soup, was chopping all the vegetables.  Lentils are ridiculously healthy, the soup is loaded with vegetables, and I used turkey kielbasa for a trimmed-down version of this soup.  So, all in all, not a bad antidote to cold winter weather and holiday sweets!

Chicken Stock

It’s rare that a Barefoot Contessa recipe has me scratching my head, especially for something so basic as chicken stock, but I have to admit that I’m a little befuddled.  The recipe for Homemade Chicken Stock on p. 61 of Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics calls for three whole chickens and a series of whole vegetables and fresh herbs.  At the end of the stock-making process, the solid ingredients are strained away and discarded.  My impression has always been that stock should be made from the discards of already-used foods:  shrimp shells for fish stock, for example.  This way, nothing is wasted.  So, I will admit this:  I did not follow the recipe for chicken stock.  I still made stock, and I took a picture of it, but until I have a stock pot big enough to handle three whole chickens and enough money to burn on wasted ingredients, I won’t be following that recipe to the letter.  Instead, I used the carcass from roasted chicken, along with some onions, garlic, and greens.  I froze the greens from the carrots we received in our CSA box this summer, and threw them into the mix.  The leafy parts of the celery for the chicken salad were also put to good use.  This method has served me well for years, and I’ll continue to employ it to make the most of what’s left in the kitchen.

Roasted Cherry Tomatoes

Are you tired of roasted vegetables yet?  We’re not!  I had several pints of sungold tomatoes hanging out in my fridge from a few weeks of CSA boxes.  They’re delicious raw in salads or just plain, but we’ve been a little bit flooded with them this summer, and so we were looking to try something different.  As with all of these roasted vegetable recipes, it’s great to try them when the weather is cool, so you’re not heating up the whole house with the oven.  We had these plain, as a side dish, but I think they’d be equally good with pasta.  The recipe is in Barefoot Contessa Parties!, p. 85.