Ina Garten swears she’s ‘not a confident cook’
Ina Garten has a shocking confession to make.
“I’m not a comfortable cook,” the Food Network personality tells Page Six in an exclusive new interview.
“Cooking is really hard for me,” she explains. “If I’m making dinner for four people, I’m like, ‘How’s this going to happen?’ I really am. I’m really not a confident cook.”
Garten, 74, surmises that her lack of confidence in the kitchen is due to the fact she is not a professional chef, so she never had to make something “over and over and over again.”
“It’s in your head and you know exactly what’s going to happen,” she says of her classically trained counterparts. “But when you’re cooking at home, you know, you go to the store, you get a chicken and maybe it’s a little bigger than the last one you got or its taste is a little different or the carrots are sweeter, and so you have to adjust along the way. I just find it hard.”
The cookbook author’s husband, Jeffrey Garten, helps build her confidence, though.
“Jeffrey says if it wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t think it was interesting,” she says. “So that part of it, I like. I like the challenge of it.”
Ina has an improbable origin story.
She married her beloved Jeffrey, the dean emeritus at the Yale School of Management, when she was only 20. After Jeffrey’s military service, the couple spent a four-month camping trip in France, which sparked Ina’s love for French cuisine. Upon her return to the US, she began working at the White House, writing nuclear energy budget and policy papers for Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
In 1978, Ina left her government job and opened a specialty food store in Westhampton Beach called Barefoot Contessa. Over 20 years later, her first cookbook came out, and since then, nearly a dozen more have followed in addition to her long-running show on Food Network.
The kitchen goddess now has a new show called “Be My Guest with Ina Garten” in which she invites celeb pals like Willie Geist, Broadway director Rob Marshall and Julianna Margulies to her home in East Hampton for a “day of conversation, connection, food and fun visits to some of her favorite local spots.”
Ina has a “very diverse” guest list, telling us, “I wanted there to be writers and singers and actors and directors, people doing really interesting things. … It was so much fun to film, and it was just a dream. Really fabulous.”
One person who likely will not appear on the show is Martha Stewart, though Ina is diplomatic when asked about the lifestyle guru’s recent dig at her in the press.
Earlier this year, Ina jokingly commented on Reese Witherspoon’s Instagram that her formula for “coping” with the seemingly never-ending COVID-19 pandemic was to drink “more large cosmos,” something that Stewart, 80, dryly denounced.
“I do not agree about taking to drink to cope with things like the pandemic,” the convicted felon told People while shilling her own wine brand.
Noting Stewart “recommended that you drink her wine instead,” Ina says, “I didn’t quite understand. I must have missed something there, right?” before graciously acknowledging that perhaps it was a case of being misquoted.
“You never know what the background is or what was said before,” she explains. ‘What was said afterward, whether it was taken out of context. I don’t know what it was about, but it was fine. It doesn’t matter.”
Fortunately, Ina still has at least one big cheerleader: Jeffrey, who seemingly loves every morsel his wife makes.
“He’s pretty fabulous,” she rhapsodizes. “He’s just, he’s extraordinary. He’s positive and supportive and happy and smart and has the biggest heart of anybody I’ve ever known. He’s just adorable. So, I got really lucky.”
“Be My Guest with Ina Garten” premieres on Discovery+ March 26. A pared-down, food-focused episode will air on the Food Network and also as a podcast.
