Barefoot Contessa How Easy Is That?: Fabulous Recipes & Easy Tips: A Cookbook|Hardcover (2024)

FAQs

What is the best Ina Garten cookbook for beginners? ›

Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics is the essential Ina Garten cookbook, focusing on the techniques behind her elegant food and easy entertaining style, and offering nearly a hundred brand-new recipes that will become trusted favorites.

For over 20 years, Ina Garten has shared her comforting and foolproof recipes with the world through her beloved cookbooks and "Barefoot Contessa" show. But before becoming a Food Network star, Garten wrote budgets at the White House and ran a Hamptons grocery store. Here's her incredible life story.

Six years, five months and three days. That's how long it took to cook every single one of Ina Garten's 1,272 recipes from her books and television show.

For twenty years, Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything has been the definitive guide to simple home cooking. This new edition has been completely revised for today's cooks while retaining Bittman's trademark minimalist style—easy-to-follow recipes and variations, and tons of ideas and inspiration.

Go-To Dinners

Cooking night after night during the pandemic inspired her to re-think the way she approached dinner, and the result is this collection of comforting and delicious recipes that you'll love preparing and serving.

In 1996, after two decades of operating Barefoot Contessa, Garten again found herself seeking a change; she sold the store to two employees, Amy Forst and Parker Hodges. She retained ownership of the building itself.

If you're starting to get into baking of any stripe, including bread (and have you seen Ina's Thanksgiving desserts?!) it's time to think about getting a good digital scale like Ina's pick, the OXO Kitchen Scale. Not only does it improve the taste of your desserts as it's more precise, but it cuts down on mess.

If you're looking for a Barefoot Contessa-approved set, check out the Maison pattern from Crate and Barrel, a mainstay Ina has said she owns over the years. Another, pricier option is the White Dinnerware set from Pillivuyt, a French brand Ina recommends for serving ware as well.

Garten, who married husband Jeffrey nearly 55 years ago when she was 20 years old, said that her own childhood is the main reason why she didn't want to expand her family. “I'm actually writing a memoir right now and it's kind of looking back at my childhood. It was nothing I wanted to recreate,” she shared.

Garten is Jewish by birth and heritage, as is her husband, but rarely refers to her religion and ethnicity, though they are showcased through the inclusion of classic Jewish cooking in her television show and cookbooks, when she makes such dishes as rugelach, challah, and brisket.

Does Ina Garten have a college degree? ›

Ina Garten once worked in the White House and worked her way up, which eventually put her in charge of writing the nuclear budget for the United States. She also managed to earn her MBA from George Washington University at the same time. Despite her success, she decided she wanted a different life.

The rest is history: She didn't attend cooking school or learn from a grandmother, but she picked up skills out of necessity while running her specialty food store, Barefoot Contessa.

But we'd guess that not many of us spend as much time in our kitchens as Ina Garten, the Food Network personality and cookbook author who goes to work in her kitchen all year long.

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Ina Garten's net worth in 2024 is estimated at $60 million. When combined with that of her husband Jeffrey, that amount is estimated at a whopping $120 million.

The average landscape cookbook size is 11 × 8.5 inches with a horizontal page orientation, but you may also opt for smaller print sizes such as 9 × 6 inches and 8.5 × 5.5 inches. The commonly used square cookbook size is 12 × 12 inches, but there are other print sizes available such as 8 × 8 inches and 6 × 6 inches.

The standard expectation is that a cookbook should have between 70 and 100 recipes, but larger compendiums have at least 200. Think carefully about how many you want to include.