Targeting the kitchen table, not the coffee table

Times Food Editor Russ Parsons on "Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics":

Judging from some of the most popular titles of the recent holiday season, you might think the only reason people bought cookbooks was to talk about them.

Let's see, we had "Under Pressure," Thomas Keller's book on sous-vide cooking, which is probably quite remarkable if you have the $2,500 to invest in the equipment necessary to cook from it. Then there was Grant Achatz's "Alinea," which, if anything, is even more beautiful than "Under Pressure" and even more impossible to use -- you'd practically have to buy out a chemical supply store first. And let's not even get started on Heston Blumenthal's "The Big Fat Duck Cookbook," which is certainly the biggest of the books (it weighs more than 10 pounds, including slipcover), and maybe the most beautiful -- and at $250 it certainly should be.

Not as long as Ina Garten is around. The down-to-earth caterer turned cookbook author's new "Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics" is the kind of book you want to thrust into the hands of every cookbook editor and say, "Here's how you do it, just like this."

Read Russ Parsons' complete review here.