Barefoot Contessa Parties! Ideas and Recipes for Easy Parties That Are Really Fun by Ina Garten Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Barefoot Contessa Parties! Ideas and Recipes for Easy Parties That Are Really Fun
Book Review: Absolutely Wonderful!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is my favorite of Ina's cookbooks because the recipes are so easy and the party ideas are so much fun! Even if you aren't planning a party, the recipes can be used daily for regular meals and the dishes can be mixed with other recipes throughout the book.
Definitely worth buying for the gourmet and regular cook alike!
Book Review: More of a lifestyle than a cookbook, but fun to look through
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Book Review: wonderful!
Summary: 5 Stars
All of Ina Garten's books are great. Recipes are easy to follow, ingredients readily available, and dishes always get rave reviews. I use her recipes on an almost daily basis. Many great ideas for enteretaining also. All 3 books are must haves.Book Review: Wonderful
Summary: 4 Stars
I love Ina's shows and books and have found that the recipes always turn out just as they should. This is the second Barefoot Contessa book I have bought and although I haven't made quite as many recipes from this one as I have from Family Style (I just got Parties!), I can tell already that this one is a winner. So far I've made the Spinach Gratin & Apple Crostata, both to rave reviews. ANyone who tells you that her books are not value for money is totally nuts. All of her recipes are totally dependable and keep me coming back again and again.
Please try he Family Style. It's magnificent!
Book Review: Gives you what you expect. Nothing More. Others are Better
Summary: 4 Stars
This is Ina Garten's second of three cookbooks and the one most closely patterned after the flagship work of her mentor, Martha Stewart. It presents ideas and recipes organized for small scale entertaining at home. As such it is no match for Stewart's `Entertaining' volume, to which I would direct you if you need to plan any serious parties with more than eight guests.Garten's first book was simply recipes from her catering business. They were probably the best she had. This book adds value to a simple collection of recipes by organizing courses into party menus designed for sixteen different family and close friend occasions. The third book seems to be composed of leftovers.
The choice of events to celebrate is a bit quirky in that traditional occasions such as Christmas, Graduation, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Mardi Gras / Carnavale, and St. Patrick's Day are not included. Rather, ten out of the sixteen are `moveable feasts' in that the menu is appropriate to just about any occasion. Some are limited by season such as `Outdoor Grill' and `Canoe Trip', but many are generic indoor excuses to have a good time, such as `Sunday Breakfast', `Pizza Party', and `Fireside Dinner'.
Unlike Stewart's book, there is really not much serious advice on how to organize for parties. Much of it is common sense plus clever ideas for special events, such as the idea to pack picnic portions in Chinese takeout cartons.
Garten has the advantage of claiming with full justification that her recipes are all specifically developed and test to work in a small party environment, as she has been in the catering business doing just this thing for many years. On reading her recipes and seeing many of them done on her Food Network TV show, I believe almost all of these recipes are simple and short in prep time, if not very cheap. The few recipes which take more than a page of large type are the baked goods. As Garten says herself, many are more a matter of `assembling' than they are of cooking.
Next to books from publishing house Alfred A. Knopf, cookbooks from Clarkson N. Potter have the most distinctive style. Where Knopf's books tend to follow the sedate style of Julia Child's classics, Potter's books for Stewart and Garten go for lots of large, glossy, very good photographs. Following the maxim that one eats with their eyes before their mouth, this may even help sell cookbooks with it's appeal to the visceral. Unfortunately, a rational look at the content versus the price suggests this book is a bit short on value. I will give Garten credit for referring to recipes in her earlier book rather than filling pages in this book with repeated recipes. I may be visually challenged, but photographs in cookbooks rarely create a positive impression and often create a negative impression if they are poorly done. In this book, I think they are a wash. They are too caught up in being artistic to give great value to the culinary, but they are not bad photos, so, they do nothing for my appreciation of the recipes.
At $35 list price for sixteen menus and about eighty new recipes, I say this is only a modest value for the cost. The tie-in to the TV show adds some value, but not much. I would recommend Sheila Lukins' book `Celebrate' as a serious resource for family gatherings. I already suggested Martha Stewart's book as a better source for larger events.
I recommend this book to any Ina Garten fans plus anyone who already has the other volumes recommended in this review, and simply needs more ideas. Professional caterers are an obvious choice. The book delivers the expected content in an attractive package. Nothing more.