Back to Basics

I love Ina Garten. Although I've only experienced limited success with her recipes, I love her show on Food Network. She makes the sorta food I want to eat. She's not overly chipper ala Rachel Ray, sexpotty like Giada or overly geeky like Alton Brown. No, she's the kind of woman I imagine being good friends with. I imagine her as friendly, smart and extremely generous. So this might be why I always refer to her cookbooks first whenever I decide I want to cook something up for myself that I'm unfamiliar with.

I own almost each of her cookbooks and they all live in my tiny kitchen so I can quickly refer to them. Even so, I wasn't feeling overly inspired by any of them lately. But Ina recently came out with a new cookbook called Back to Basics that I thought looked awesome. So awesome that I bought it was a gift for food buddy Caroline and was a little sad to give it away. So E bought it for me as a Xmas gift so I had a copy of my own.

I found a yummy sounding butternut curry soup inside and have been wanting to try it for a while now. It looked very simple and easy. And since I had a day off from work, I figured I might as well give it a whirl. I also decided that I wanted dessert too and was craving chocolate mousse. My craving is odd given the very bad experience I had with chocolate mousse in the 8th grade.

My 8th grade French class was having a party, and I was given the task of making chocolate mousse. How I ended up with this task is beyond me, because I had no clue how to make it. But sure, I told the teacher I'd give it a shot if she gave me a recipe for it. Too bad the recipe she gave me involved things that a 13 year old knows nothing about, such as brewed coffee, cognac and an ice bath. All I can say is that the mousse was a disaster and turned into lumpy chocolate soup sans coffee, cognac and ice bath. That was the first and last time I made chocolate mousse until tonight.

I, being an Ina devotee, checked to see if she had a recipe for chocolate mousse and she did. It, of course, involved two different types of alcohol. Given my experience with Ina's tiramisu and the sheer amount of rum in that dish, I decided that I'd use a different recipe. I wanted something fairly simple but with a slight depth of flavor. I looked in my Betty Crocker cookbook and found a recipe that involved a total of four ingredients: chocolate chips, sugar, egg yolks, whipping cream. And while the recipe was idiotically simple (why didn't my French teacher give me this recipe to make?!?!), I was afraid the taste would be dull as well. I decided to improvise a bit and added instant espresso to the cream I had to heat as well as some good vanilla extract too.

What resulted was an incredibly rich and light mousse with the exact depth of flavor I wanted as a result of the espresso and vanilla. Yum! It's the sort of thing that you can't eat a lot of, but boy, you really wish you could! Thanks Betty Crocker Cookbook!

So back to the curry butternut soup...it was simple, simple, simple. Roast cubes of butternut squash, onion and apple until they're soft and cooked thru, run it thru a food mill (or a blender in my case), add to chicken stock, sprinkle with curry, salt and pepper and garnish with coconut, banana and cashews.

I liked how easy the soup was to bring together, although I hate, with a passion, cutting the squash. It's just so boring to me and seems like it always takes forever to peel and cube. So I roasted and pureed and soon dinner was ready. E dressed the greens I purchased with a simple oil and vinegar dressing and I pulled out soup bowls.

The soup was nice. It was sweet because of the butternut squash. The curry flavor wasn't as apparent as I had hoped though.

I wonder if I'll always be kinda lukewarm about the actual outcome of my Ina Garten recipes. I mean, I love her so much, but everything I'd ever followed of hers, turns out eh. It's good but never great. Perhaps I love Ina so much, too much that nothing will ever live up to my expectations. Maybe I need to start building a lower pedal stool in my head for my Ina. I'll think about it...

Dear Ina,

Hey lady, what's up? I'm loving that I'm seeing new shows and that you are still loving life out in the Hamptons. I haven't heard you mention Chris and Joey lately, so I hope you haven't lost your cute little token lesbian couple on the show. And where the hell has that adorable Parker Hodges gone to? I loved that episode where you made him set up a BBQ fire grill for a "surprise". Poor Parker is probably thinking, "sweet, I'm going to have me some Barefoot Contessa grilled shrimp, lobster, steak!" What was the surprise? Grilled pizzas. Um yeah, Parker probably hasn't been over since he got duped into thinking he was getting a surprise only to get something he could recreate in his toaster oven.

But you're as cute as a button and how could anyone stay mad at you? Especially when you seem to always bear gifts of brownies, carrot cake and free form plum crostata. Everyone knows I adore you and then some (my offer to come live with you and have you feed me every day still stands) but I really do need to sit and have a heart to heart with you.

See, here's the thing. I love your show and your cookbooks make everything seem simple and yum. But lately all the recipes I've tried from any of your three cookbooks I own, well, they haven't gone so great.

It all started with the 40 clove of garlic recipe. Peeling blanched garlic cloves and 40 of them, hmm, well it was time consuming but I figured it was for you. I thought, "This is for my girl, Ina, and well if she said so, I'll do it". So I did and the chicken was nice but it wasn't amazing and certainly was a let down. My own crispy roasted chicken recipe could have kicked your average 40 clove chicken anyday. "Oh well", I thought, "I've had great success with your chicken and biscuits recipe and your pasta, pesto and peas is a magical creation". So I blindly continued to follow you.

My issues with your cookbooks continued into a tiramisu recipe. If the word for tiramisu comes from the Italian phrase, "pick me up", well your tiramisu was sure to knock someone out! It was boozy and so boozy that the minute I opened the fridge, my entire kitchen reeked of rum. It was completely inedible b/c of the booze and I ended up throwing it out. I almost cried over having to waste all that beautiful mascarpone cheese. I pondered how you, dear Ina, could have made such a recipe. Is being married to Jeffrey so hard that you have to numb your woes with boozy desserts? Why Ina, why? Eventually, I took the rum content down A LOT and suddenly the recipe was able to shine. It was simple and lovely. It's a keeper recipe but one that has red sharpie crossing out the rum content to a much lesser AAA membership level.

But this last issue comes over something I hold very near and dear to my heart...Pizza. See, I was having some friends over to try that summer buttermilk and radish soup I had made (it was good, the texture was weird though) and thought I'd finally get around to using my new pizza stone. I was so excited. But what pizza dough recipe to use? I've had this one recipe that I've used since I was 15 and well, don't laugh, it came from Seventeen Magazine. Hey, I told you not to laugh! It's a great recipe, easy to make and fantastic results. And well, I also had your Parties cookbook that I had been given for X-mas (I want to give her a copy too but can't seem to find it anywhere, sold out, or pulled off the shelves for faulty recipes, hmmm...) and I remembered a recipe for pizza dough.

So, who would win the dough contest? You, my dear Contessa, a royal of food network and the Hamptons or Seventeen magazine, a publication that taught me to hate my body and decide I wasn't white enough to ever be pretty? It was a tough contest, well, not really. So I flipped to the pizza dough recipe and followed your directions.

I noticed that the dough didn't rise too much and well, when it came time to roll it out into six rounds, it was no easy task. The dough was tough, tough, tough. And the final outcome? The pizzas were more like cracker crusts than doughy. It was as though I didn't even need to put the yeast into this one. Was my yeast old? Did I over mix the dough? Sigh. Your pizza dough left me disappointed and doubtful.

I have to admit, as much as I'm sure it was a user error (meaning me), I also think perhaps it might be something to do with the recipe. I'm kinda disappointed. I miss the days when I trusted you unequivocally. The days I'd dream of frolicking with you on the beach eating bbq chicken, pasta salad and other delights. Oh Ina, Ina, where did it all go wrong? And more importantly how do I get back to our former magic? I'm afraid to choose another recipe to try, for fear that it will just be another tangled mess of average, disappointment and rum.

I'm going to go back to Epicurious recipes for a while and nurse my wounds. I promise I'll try and come back to you soon, but for now, I need some space. I'm hurt, but I hope we can patch things up enough that we can stay friends. It's not you, it's just me.

Sincerely yours,
L