Lemon Chicken Breasts (or Thighs, if you’re feeling rebellious or just cheap)

This recipe comes from Barefoot Contessa:  How Easy is That?

If I had actually followed the directions, it would probably look a lot more like the photo in the cookbook.  Instead, I substituted garlic scapes for cloves of garlic and summer savory instead of oregano and thyme.  I also substituted chicken stock for wine, and used way too much of it, both because I’m too lazy to go out and buy wine, and not motivated enough to actually measure anything.  And of course, I used thighs instead of breasts because that’s what we had.

These are garlic scapes. They look weird, don't they?

The results were still good, if ugly.  It has been deemed worthy of repeating, at the very least.  It’s great to have another use for chicken, and we’re always looking for something (hopefully a protein) to go with our vegetables in the summer.  I think that these ingredients would make a nice marinade for the grill, too, if you didn’t want to heat up the oven.

The Story of the Flag Cake

Some of you may be (rightfully) expecting the famous Barefoot Contessa Flag Cake (from Barefoot Contessa Family Style) to show up here, now that it’s Independence Day.  I’m sorry that you’ll have to wait until next year for that treat, but I’ll share with you a story – and a different dessert – instead.

The Flag Cake is what brought me to Ina.  The recipe was originally published in Martha Stewart Living magazine in July 2001, where Ina Garten published a guest piece.  If you’re keeping track, I was 23 at the time.  You may be asking yourself:  what 23-year-old subscribes to Martha Stewart Living?  I did, and unapologetically so.  I even made the cake for my coworkers that summer, when I was interning at the Department of Health and Human Services between my second and third years of law school. This was the summer of 2001, and security was tight in federal buildings even before the events that happened on September 11 of that year.  My coworkers were just as impressed with the fact that I brought a butter knife to work and through the metal detectors as they were with the cake.  “We haven’t seen a real metal knife ’round these parts in YEARS!”  I didn’t even know that I was slipping anything nefarious past the guards.  I have that doe-eyed (some would say vacuous) look about me, and I’m sure they just thought, “There goes that nice Midwestern girl with the cow-town accent and a big-ass flag cake.”  Yes, that was me.

Anyway, we enjoyed the cake that summer, and in summers to follow.  I’ve even been known to plan whole celebrations around that cake.  For a while, people just thought I was really patriotic, wanting to celebrate Independence Day so fervently every year.  Nope.  I just wanted to make that flag cake.

I can’t tell you what, exactly, appealed to me so much about the flag cake.  I remember leafing through the Sunday paper circulars when I was a little girl, wanting to make the (in retrospect, horrifying) patriotic cakes with Cool Whip and red, white, and blue Jell-O.  I wasn’t particularly fond of any of the ingredients, but I wanted to make something pretty.  We weren’t pretty dessert people when I was growing up.  Do you see what happens, parents of the world, when you deny your child something?  They grow up and obsess about it, and 25 years later they’re blogging about a cake.  I can tell you, though, what appealed to me about Ina Garten’s guest piece in the Martha Stewart magazine that summer.  Her ingredients were fresh and simple, and her instructions were easy to follow.  Everything she made was beautiful, but not fussy or pretentious, and it tasted so, so good.

So, why didn’t I make it this year?  We’re still adjusting to life as a family of four, so we’re not quite up to throwing a big party just yet.  That cake requires a whole party, and it would not freeze well with all of the beautiful fresh berries on it.  Maybe I’ll pretend to be Betsy Ross and make it for my birthday in a few weeks if the berries still look good.

Instead, I made the Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp from Barefoot Contessa:  How Easy is That?

The blue baking dish that holds it was a wedding gift, and it’s one of my favorite things.  It gave the whole dish a patriotic flair, which made me feel slightly less guilty for putting off the flag cake for another year.

I’m not ordinarily excited about rhubarb.  It’s bitter, so it requires a lot of sugar, and I think most people don’t sweeten it enough to make it palatable.  I could never understand why my grandmother gave it away as a gift like a bouquet of flowers.  As it turns out, some folks get really excited about rhubarb:  there’s an entire festival devoted to it in Lanesboro, Minnesota.  Also, I think a lot of northern locavores like it because it’s a great source of Vitamin C that can actually be grown here.  Still, I kind of scoffed at rhubarb until I had to make it for this project.  I will scoff no more.  I should have known that Ina could make even the lowly stalk-like plant that pops up like a weed in my parents’ back yard every spring delicious.  I used some of the leftover strawberries from the fruit platter that I brought to the Contessa party.

Not only is this crisp delicious, it’s also beautiful.  Baking the strawberries and the rhubarb together brings out a bright red hue.  A few notes, though:  the whole thing is incredibly soupy.  The recipe instructs us to serve it with vanilla ice cream, which I think is a good move.  Also, the recipe calls for 4 cups of rhubarb, or 4-5 stalks.  I needed more like 6-7 large stalks to make 4 cups of diced rhubarb.

So, flag cake, you’ll have to wait a while to appear here.  Your lowly rhubarb cousin will have to suffice for now.

A Very Contessa Party

Some friends of ours had a Barefoot Contessa party last week.  As Ina would say, “How fun is that?”  Our answer:  very!  We were all assigned a dish or two, and we let our tribe of wild children run wild while we compared cooking notes.  As we all arrived at the party, the power went out.  Some fierce Midwestern thunderstorms were rolling through town, and the house went dark and quiet.  Thankfully, our hosts were well supplied with candles and good cheer, and the remainder of the cooking was done on the grill.  Also, it doesn’t really get dark here until well into the evening in the summer, so we had plenty of natural light to see what we were doing and whose kid we might be stepping on.

This is how you'll find my 3-year-old every time we visit our hosts' house. They bring out the trains just for him.

My contribution was a fruit platter, which is really a cop-out, but I got a free pass because I brought a baby to pass around.  Have I mentioned how much we like these friends?  The food was fantastic, and the company even better.

The menu:

Fruit platter (The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook)
Herb-marinated pork tenderloin
Herbed basmati rice
Orange honey glazed carrots
Fresh corn salad (The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook)
Ginger cookies
Lemon yogurt cake 

 

 

I failed to take a photo before we dug in. You'll have to trust that this looked prettier at one time, and that it was all delicious.

My mouth is watering just thinking about the excellent food we enjoyed there.   Next time, I promise to do more than cut up fruit.

Herbed Rice, Fresh Corn Salad, Glazed Carrots (with ginger added, which was all kinds of awesome)

A festive table decoration. The candles not only provided light; they actually added a nice colonial feel to the whole night.

Fresh Peach Cake

My husband has never met a peach he didn’t like.  So, when I saw a big flat of peaches at Costco (originally from California), I knew we’d put them to good use.  It’s taken me a while to break away from my comfort zone of peach crisp (similar to this plum crunch) and custard peach pie (kind of like this one), but this recipe (from Barefoot Contessa:  How Easy is That?) was worth the leap of faith.

The only problem I found with this recipe was the cooking time.  I ended up cooking it for closer to 90 minutes instead of the suggested 50-55 minutes.  That was not my cuppa on a hot summer day (which, by the way, Ina, if you’re reading, hot summer days go hand in hand with peach season).  Then again, I might just need to get an oven thermometer to test the true temperature of my oven, which Ina has been preaching for years.

In any event, the final product was very tasty, and deemed breakfast-worthy by my family.

Raspberry Vodka

Even though I’m not a drinker, I still find humor in the fact that the first thing that I made for this project post-baby is this vodka from Barefoot Contessa Parties.  Apparently it takes 6 months to infuse.  In the meantime, it’s very pretty, no?

PS I don’t know vodka from a hole in the wall (really and truly), but rumor has it that the Kirkland (Costco store brand) version is the same stuff as Grey Goose, which costs about twice as much.

Red Velvet Cupcakes

I actually made these back in February, for Valentine’s Day, but I still remember how good they were.  There’s no shortage of opinions about red velvet:  some people love it, and some people hate it.  I fall somewhere in the middle, where I believe that it’s as good of a vehicle as any for cream cheese frosting.  I have a friend who believed that the red coloring came from a special kind of flour only grown in the South.  (Not surprisingly, this friend is Dixie, through and through.)  Actually, the coloring comes from a mother lode of red food coloring.  For this batch (recipe from Barefoot Contessa:  How Easy Is That?), I bought the red dye at Whole Foods, not so much out of a desire to avoid artificial ingredients, although I probably should have been thinking along those lines, given the fact that I was gestating at the time.  Really, I just wanted to save myself a trip to another store and I was at Whole Foods already.  I had to ask an employee for help finding it.  He asked if I was making red velvet cake, and I told him about these cupcakes.  He got a little wistful, saying that his now-ex-girlfriend used to make him red velvet cake from scratch.  He asked if I was making cream cheese frosting, and when I told him yes, I think he got a little tear in his eye.  I really should have brought him some of these to share, but I was pregnant, and lazy, and hungry, and it was probably snowing that day.  In any event, this post is dedicated to you, the nameless Whole Foods employee whose heart was broken by a beautiful baker.

Panko-Crusted Salmon and Warm French Lentils

These recipes, both from Barefoot Contessa:  How Easy Is That?, would make the perfect New Year’s Resolution meal.  I’ve made this twice in a week, and my husband has raved about the results.  He is not known to be a health food fiend, so it’s not a small thing that he went back for seconds on the lentils and asked for the salmon again less than a week later.

A few tweaks:  I omitted the step in the lentils recipe calling for the onion pierced with cloves, and the turnip.  There was still plenty of flavor, and the lentils are still excellent (even cold) the next day.  The salmon, when started on the stove top, made a huge mess of the pan.  Instead, the second time, I started it in the hot oven, and then added the panko mixture.  Much less messy, with just as much flavor.  I also might have doubled the amount of lemon zest – I just used the zest of an entire lemon.

I buy Copper River salmon (Alaskan wild salmon) from Costco.  I like that it’s individually frozen, so I can just thaw one at a time.

Weeknight Bolognese

My husband and I consider ourselves well-qualified tasters of bolognese, or spaghetti with meat sauce.  We’ve eaten it at restaurants, at home, and even (I will admit) a doctored-up version of the jarred variety from Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods.  It’s a staple at our house, and in our ordering rotation at restaurants.  This is, bar none, the best either of us has ever tasted.  I’ve made it twice in the last week, and it’s a testament to the health of our marriage that we split up the leftovers without a fight.

Beef and Barley Soup

This soup recipe (Barefoot Contessa How Easy Is That?) calls for ox tails.  OX TAILS.  No thank you.  I used a sirloin roast instead, cutting it up and browning the pieces before adding them to the soup.  I also made my own beef stock from the soup bones that came with our CSA grass-fed beef share.

It was, quite simply, delicious, and just the thing to warm us during a week of sub-zero temperatures.

Tuna & Hummus Sandwiches

These may not look very exciting, but they’re good simple lunch fare that’s a healthy alternative to the usual humdrum that I throw together for myself.  I used English muffins instead of sourdough toast, and cucumbers instead of radishes, but they were delicious.  Barefoot Contessa:  How Easy Is That?