Barefoot Contessa Recipes

Barefoot Contessa, aka Ina Garten, has hosted her show on the Food Network since 2002. In addition to her obviously killer recipes, she passes out tips on how to entertain with the food you have prepared and how to decorate the house.

Garten plays house on each episode, making the meal for some special person or gathering of special people. Her husband Jeffrey is a likely candidate every episode, as she loves to cook him her Roasted Chicken recipe every eingle Friday night. She gets many fresh ingredients from her own garden. Garten works in the garden.

Unlike many celebrity chefs, Barefoot Contessa does not stay in the kitchen the entire episode. She often goes out to local shop to find just the right spice, or out to her garden to harvest her colorful vegetables.

Garten bought a specialty foods store in 1978 which had been opened three years earlier as "The Barefoot Contessa" after a 1954 movie under that name, but with the intriguing subtitle: The Worlds Most Beautiful Animal. The plot involved a woman named Maria Vargas who was shot by her impotent husband after she got pregnant. I wonder how closely Garten identifies with the "beautiful animal" Maria who starred in the film. She was a beautiful dancer who went around barefoot because she was so carefree.

It is especially ironic to me that the actress who played Maria Vargas was named Ava Gardner. Isn't this really close to Ina Garten? And yet she didn't name her store, she just bought it. Perhaps the name is why she bought the store. In which case, she must be obsessed with the character of Maria Vargas.

 The Turkey Meatloaf is a specialty from Barefoot Contessa's kitchen. Her Chicken Stew with Biscuits is a memory we all share from one of her first shows. Indonesian Ginger Chicken is a unique ethnic excursion. Tequila Lime Chicken was not bad. Pesto, Pasta, and Peas will get a lot of remarks from your food eating victims. Chedar Corn Chowder is probably the easiest to make delight of the bunch.

So Barefoot Contessa has taken some understandable criticism for not having lunch with a 6-year-old boy dying of cancer who asked for this as part of his "Make a Wish Foundation" wish (apparently Rachel Ray wasn't interesting enough). The barefooted food God was too busy to eat with him before he died.

But she may not have know what to cook for the meal... what exactly is in a cancer diet?

Anyway, some people think she is a bad evil woman. Like this "Deb:"

"I am SO sorry, but the woman cares about nothing. Her 'charity garden lunch' with Alec Baldwin was absolutely embarrassing. She was snarky, and acted totally above doing it. The food was disgusting (a cup of lemon juice in milk and cream cucumber soup? You could see it curdle!) I cannot imagine how nasty she would be to a sick child."

Now, Barefoot Contessa loves to cook her recipes, but does she really have to get some thrill out of participating in charity garden lunches to help Alec Baldwin's unemployed brothers? And why in a garden. She's probably looking at all of those vegetables just growing before her lusty eyes, and she wants to cook. Of course she was snarky! As far as the food, that sounds really bad. I bet Barefoot Contessa stuck her bare foot in your milky soup and slushed around for a while to make it curdle.

Contessa's Karma is doing fine.