Barefoot Contessa Parties! Ideas and Recipes for Easy Parties That Are Really Fun

Customer Reviews

Finally! A cookbook for the rest of us!

I love to cook and bake but I run screaming from complicated recipes. This cookbook contains simple recipes for really great-tasting food. It is uncomplicated and the adjoining photographs are simple and elegant. Never have I found a cookbook where page after page I have found recipes that I actually want to try.

I made the ceasar salad the first day I bought the book, the sour cream coffee cake the second. Both turned out fantastic! Tomorrow I shall conquer the delicious-looking rugelach.

The book is touted for parties but don't let that fool you. These are great recipes for simple family dinners as well as large parties. The book is also sprinkled with Ina Garten's advice and past experiences.

I thank Ina Garten for this wonderful new cookbook - but moreover, my husband thanks her!

Ina's Right On Mark With Her Super Recipes!!

Ina's new book is just wonderful, it is full of beautiful pictures and great easy recipes. I own her first book, so when I found out she had a new one out I just had to have it. Her recipes use fresh ingredients and the taste and results are just sublime!! The Lemon Cake recipe is divine as well as her Pasta, Peas and Pesto salad. The layout is easy to read, and she has little stories interweaved throughout so you feel like she is talking to you. I just love her books, I keep them on my kitchen counter along with other favorites. I hear she is hard at work on her next creation. You will not be disappointed with her cookbooks!!

More of a lifestyle than a cookbook, but fun to look through

This book has gorgeous photos and is fun, but it's not really designed for a regular person's life. Garten's idea of parties, which she writes in the introduction, are mostly small gatherings. This means that the book isn't very helpful for larger groups.
There are some tips on organizing the party, but not as much I would have liked, such as a timeline of how when to prepare things. Of course, when you are only doing a small party this isn't as important, but even for the tea for 25 she doesn't tell you how you should store things or what you should make first and last.

My major complaint would probably be the cost of the recipes. Wow. This book is about how we might like to entertain our closest and dearest friends if we had a vacation house in the Hamptons and a BMW (oh wait...). So, really the book is about an ideal lifestyle most of us just wish we had.

It's a fun read and has some interesting recipe ideas, but is not all that practical.