Cooking Dreams & Destiny with Ina Garten

Jen: Everybody, welcome to the show! We literally have something cooking for our listeners today. I’m sorry; I shouldn’t have said that, but I couldn’t help it. It’s a big one! The Queen is here. We have Ina Garten on the show today. I didn’t sleep well. I’ll tell you that.

Amy: I had interesting stress dreams.

Jen: It’s so true! Oh my God, you texted me about that. Can you share it? Do you mind?

Amy: I mean…

Jen: This is a text from Amy this morning. We know we have Ina today, and we’ve been preparing by reading her book. So I got a text this morning…

Amy: I just have these stress dreams where it’s like I’m in school again. I have the wrong time, I sleep late, I prepare for the wrong guest, and I only bring my bathing suit.

Jen: That one was the one I particularly enjoyed!

Amy: Like, when will this stop? I don’t think you told me it would stop. You said you still have stress dreams about public speaking.

Jen: I don’t have podcast nightmares, but I have public speaking nightmares as a speaker. The number of times I dream that it’s always about preparation… Am I missing my notes? I can’t find my notes. My notes won’t print. I have water spilled all over them, and I can’t read them? I only have one page when I need five. And always, always, always, I’m on in three minutes. I have no idea what I’m going to say. I’m panicked. I’m just trying to tell you, I’ve been having those dreams for 20 years, so I’m sorry to tell you.

Amy: You talking about it is actually making me anxious again. Sorry about that.

Jen: Okay. If you know a solitary thing about me, Ina is my person. In my own cookbook—and not just in cookbooks; in my other books, I write about her all the time. I’m always saying, “Well, as you know, Ina says…” or “Ina would do this…” or “Ina says to use the good olive oil, so I do, damn it!” Ina taught me how to cook, so… anyway, I’m a little freaked out about today, in a good way.

Amy: In a good way. It’s amazing!

Jen: So, in honor of our… well, we’ll certainly become new best friends with Ina…

Amy: Obviously!

Jen: How could that not be the obvious outcome of today’s episode? Let’s get ready for another installment of Gen X cellence!

Jen: Okay, so in honor of the Queen, this is going to be a special food edition of Genexcellence. And listen, this could end up being 100 segments of its own. So, Amy, what food did you eat growing up in Gen X that your kids would just be like, “WTF”? Like, hard pass?

Amy: Actually, I have two comments.

Jen: Oh, good!

Amy: Number one: My mom—sorry, Mom—grew up in Louisiana. Not her fault, this food choice, but we had peanut butter and mayonnaise sandwiches.

Jen: No, I do not accept this at all!

Amy: And that’s why I don’t eat mayonnaise.

Jen: Oh, that’s the origin story of your aversion. Yes, frankly, I understand it.

Amy: It wasn’t all the time. It wasn’t forced; it just was something we ate. And it’s an abomination.

Jen: Goosebumps! I have never heard of peanut butter and mayonnaise.

Amy: And you lived in South Louisiana!

Jen: Frankly, I feel like that’s where I learned how to eat.

Amy: Well, this is a dark secret; I don’t know… Anyway…

Jen: It’s devastating!

Amy: So, I don’t know.

Jen: Does your sister like it?

Amy: No. Nobody, actually. Well, that’s not true—somebody must. But we stopped eating that, you know, when we started making our own sandwiches in middle school. It still haunts me.

Jen: God, literally, like last week, I asked, “Do you want some egg salad?” and you said, “Does it have mayonnaise in it?” Like, mayonnaise is the number one ingredient. You said, “Pass.” I didn’t realize it came from such childhood trauma!

Amy: My friends and my kids haven’t been exposed to that, but they have been exposed to… and this is like an early Gen X story. My friends and I years ago decided— I don’t know why—to have a weird food potluck centered around ’70s food.

Jen: Quick question for clarification: at what age were you when you had this party? Like, this is later when you’re an adult and you’re going backward, right?

Amy: Right. We involved all our children. Oh, this was maybe ten years ago, seven years ago. We rented the Elks Lodge and had a party.

Jen: That’s so cute!

Amy: We all made the most diabolical recipes we could find. I ordered Vienna sausage off of Amazon. I don’t remember what I made, but there was so much Jell-O…

Jen: Oh my God, so much Jell-O!

Amy: And so much cottage cheese!

Jen: Yes! But the superstar of the potluck…

Amy: I’m trying with all my brain to think of what it’s going to be.

Amy: Was a clam dip. And it wasn’t just the food; it was the recipe because we brought the cookbook or the recipe card that we had used.

Jen: Sure!

Amy: Actually, I still have it on my phone.

Jen: This is so exciting!

Amy: I know! I will pull it up, and then we’re going to have to flash it to the camera so they can see it.

Jen: Okay, can you see that?

Amy: It’s typed in typewriter font.

Jen: Oh, it’s Barbara’s classic appetizer!

Amy: Of course it is!

Jen: Typed out like a regular recipe.

Amy: This is the first line, though: “Oh no, Barbara was a b**** who was supposed to be my friend, who slept with Howie while I was going out with him.” I guess that doesn’t say too much for him either. “Two eight-ounce cans of minced clams with juice…” It just goes on.

Jen: Here…

Amy: Right, with the…

Jen: Red… just going to set you up for some context here. Barbara was a b****.

Amy: But her clam appetizer was delicious. Circa 1976, I guess.

Jen: That’s amazing!

Amy: Anyway, I did not eat the clam. It was…

Jen: Probably mayonnaise.

Amy: Right, and clams.

Jen: Barbara was a b**** anyway. God, that is a treasure!

Amy: I know!

Jen: I wish that was in my recipe box! Like, weeks ago—never knowing anything about our interview with Ina—I texted my friend Jenn. Of course, her name is Jennifer. Randomly, I said, “Do you still have that recipe card for that b**** Barbara?”

Amy: Yeah, I mean, I swear to God. And you know we both love her. We do. We love Ina. My mom… we love her. Cooking wasn’t her best category.

Amy: It is now!

Jen: I mean, she has improved greatly. She gets the most improved award, for sure. But back then, she just absolutely bought into all of the food trends. We grew up with garbage. All of our vegetables came out of a can—all of them! She’d open the cans and boil them to smithereens. Just don’t talk to Dr. King about this; he has so much trauma from the way Mom used to do broccoli. First of all, the broccoli might have been fancy; it might have been frozen, but she would just open the package, put it in a pan, cover it in water, and boil it until it was just little bits of green. This is disgusting. Well, unseasoned, of course.

Amy: You probably don’t know this, but I’m actually going to your parents’ house for dinner tonight.

Jen: You are? Is Brad Harden going to yell at the boys?

Amy: No, oh that’s fine.

Jen: Just the two of us. Anyway, I guarantee you she’s not serving boiled broccoli.

Amy: She has elevated her food point of view since then. But I’ll tell you one thing that Janna did make for us back in the Gen X days that I would eat right now: fried bologna sandwiches on white bread with one slice of American cheese and mayonnaise. Let’s see…

Amy: Oh my God, look, my mouth is watering! It’s delicious!

Jen: You’ve had bologna, surely!

Amy: I have, when I didn’t know any better.

Jen: Well, I understand what you’re saying. I’m not saying I buy it now, but if someone put it in front of me, I would eat it. Bologna is delicious in the same way that hot dogs are delicious.

Amy: Okay.

Jen: You know what I mean.

Amy: I will concede that point.

Jen: Yet it’s disgusting. Processed—whatever. I can’t even call it meat. It’s not meat.

Amy: No, and I will still eat hot dogs. So I get it; it’s the same.

Jen: I feel bad when I…

Amy: Do unfair judgment on my part.

Jen: Also, American cheese, in some cases, still reigns supreme. Yes, in some cases, I love American cheese on a cheeseburger.

Amy: Well, chemicals smell better than real cheese.

Jen: They sure do. Like they’re made…

Amy: To melt better.

Jen: Excuse me, what do you think we put in at least half our queso? Right? At least half? It’s got disgusting globules like cubes of Velveeta.

Amy: That’s the recipe!

Jen: Well, because it’s good! I’ll tell you, if I have separated cheddar cheese one more time, I swear to God. One other thing: besides the canned vegetables, which is a genuine tragedy, I have a caveat. I think the only good canned vegetables are canned peas. I can’t explain it or defend my position, but that’s how I feel.

Amy: Oh, I still like canned peas.

Amy: I eat canned beans a lot.

Jen: Okay, well, does that count? I mean, vegetables like that? Canned green beans and canned corn? That’s all my family ever used. But one thing we ate a lot in the ’70s had a real moment—oh my God!—and it’s having another moment now. I’ve never stopped loving it: cottage cheese.

Amy: Oh, yeah!

Jen: Do you like cottage cheese?

Amy: Yes.

Jen: God, me too! How do you like to eat it?

Amy: Out of the container.

Jen: Just raw, like just cottage cheese? I would eat that way too, but I don’t know if this is weird, but I like cottage cheese with roasted sunflower seeds and balsamic reduction.

Amy: Oh, it’s delicious!

Jen: Okay, okay. I have those things in my house.

Amy: It’s just weirdly good! It’s creamy, sweet, tangy, crunchy, and salty. By the way, we’ll have to revisit food in another Gen X cellence segment because this goes on and on forever.

Amy: On and on.

Jen: How did we thrive?

Amy: I don’t know.

Jen: We were undernourished.

Amy: There were different metrics for measuring health in the ’70s.

Jen: That is true! Do you remember the food pyramid? Do you remember what was at the bottom?

Amy: Yeah.

Jen: Bread?

Amy: Yeah.

Jen: Like eight servings a day!

Amy: I didn’t mind it at the time, but…

Jen: Same.

Amy: Not the best.

Jen: One more segment before we get to the Queen, Ina Garten. Okay, let’s get into a little culture shock.

Jen: All right, keeping on the food theme: food shows are now absolutely a part of the cultural zeitgeist, which wasn’t even a thing back then. Now there are tons of dedicated networks and specials, and I can’t even remember a time when there wasn’t food TV, frankly. But do you remember, like, the first kind of front edge of this? Watching someone else cook on TV?

Amy: I did watch food shows all the time when they started becoming really popular. The first one I watched was “30 Minute Meals.”

Jen: Oh, Rachael Ray!

Amy: Yes! When my oldest was a teeny tiny baby, still nursing on the couch every two hours, I would sit and watch it every single day in the late afternoon just for inspiration—that I wouldn’t die if I attempted to make a meal while also having a baby. I could watch her do it in real-time. Thirty minutes! Like, other people were doing this; it was going to be okay. I rarely made the actual recipes, but it helped my brain sort of compartmentalize the task of making dinner. It didn’t need to be catastrophic. I could just go into the kitchen, and 30 minutes later, we would have something to eat.

Jen: It’s just food.

Amy: It’s just food! You can get it done quickly.

Jen: Yes! But then I did start watching all the others, and specifically, Barefoot Contessa was the one that took me to the next level: you can add fresh herbs!

Amy: Oh yeah. It’s so worth it!

Jen: That was a revelation to me.

Amy: It tastes so much better! Your people feel like you put in a little extra effort.

Jen: You can even add it to something store-bought, and it just wakes it up.

Amy: Yes! So I watched all of those.

Jen: Oh my gosh, when the boys were really little…

Amy: I’ve said this before; I actually wrote this in my cookbook, I think in the intro, but I did not grow up knowing how to cook. Mom wasn’t a good cook, and she didn’t want us in the kitchen. Why would she? I wouldn’t. So we didn’t learn at her elbow like a lot of people do when they grow up cooking with their moms and grandmas. I didn’t know anything about cooking when I got married as a child bride. It was a tragedy, truly! I swear, I think we had been married maybe a year when Bob Hatmaker came to visit us, and I made for him… canned ham.

Amy: Oh, I don’t know what to say.

Jen: I’m so mortified and horrified to this day, like 30 years later.

Amy: That’s not even something you make! You just open a can.

Jen: Correct.

Amy: Okay.

Jen: I don’t know what to say! I don’t know how to help you understand that, but that’s what I did. So anyway, I didn’t know anything about food. One year, when my kids were just babies—like tiny babies, from birth to four—it was so overwhelming! And I was just mad all the time. I was like, “Why do I have to cook for you? Who else could do it?” So it was like New Year’s Day one year, and I’m not even a New Year’s resolution type. But I thought, “Okay, is there anything at all that I would like to do slightly better?” I mean, it was a very low bar—not like I’m going to conquer this—but just, “Is there room for like a 4% improvement somewhere?” I thought maybe I could figure out the cooking problem. I have to cook; people have to eat, and I should just stop being mad at kindergartners for being hungry all the time.

Jen: So, I started watching the Food Network. That was my first year really starting to explore cooking: “What is cooking? How do you cook? How do you chop? How do you put food together? How do ingredients become food?” Because at that point, I had only done very basic things—like from bag to pan to plate. So yeah, my early teachers were definitely Rachael Ray, and Paula Deen—remember her back in the old days?—and even Emeril. Emeril was kind of an early adopter on the network. Sandra Lee—did you ever watch “Semi-Homemade”?

 

Amy: Yes.

Jen: All of that. That was my culinary school. Those were my teachers.

Amy: Same.

Jen: And obviously Ina. Ina taught me really early on. I mean, I wasn’t doing a lot of entertaining back then because who would want to come to a home with three little babies? Nobody. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want to live there, so I wasn’t going to invite anyone in. But I remember Ina saying things like, when you have friends over for dinner, two of your four dishes can be store-bought. And I was like, “It can?” She just took the gravitas off of it all and said, “Well, I mean, it’s unnecessary. Just go to your cheesemonger.” I’m like, “I don’t have a cheesemonger.”

Jen: I loved the early iteration of Ina and her colleagues who were just teaching us how to cook. Now it’s all competitions, and it’s different now. But I will forever be grateful to Ina Garten for coming to me through my television, showing me how to chop garlic, and teaching me about parsley. It’s just food.

Amy: It’s just food, but it can be beautiful, and it can be a labor of love without being a huge effort. That’s the thing.

Jen: The big lift for me was realizing it’s just food, and you can enjoy it. I had no idea you could enjoy cooking. I didn’t know it could be a fun part of your day, something you looked forward to, or a way to decompress. That’s never how I experienced cooking. Watching people love it in their kitchens flipped a switch in my brain, and I decided I was going to become a person who enjoys cooking. And I did.

Amy: And you did! And then you wrote a cookbook.

Jen: You’re blowing me away! I served canned ham to my father-in-law. So, that’s a good segue because it’s Ina time. Just in case you’ve emerged from a 30-year coma, let me tell you about Ina. She is genuinely a pioneer in the foodie world. As we mentioned, she was part of the early edge of the TV food zeitgeist, back when it was really just a pretty good cook in their kitchen teaching us how to make things. There wasn’t a lot of razzle-dazzle like we see now. But I think Ina and her colleagues raised a generation of home cooks. That’s at least how I see her work—it made cooking accessible.

Her show, Barefoot Contessa, which was also the name of her first little food shop, is beloved. She says it has 24 seasons, but our intel says 28. How can she know the exact number? What’s the difference at this point? She has a new show that came out of the pandemic, which I have not missed an episode of. It’s called Be My Guest, where she invites a delightful person into her kitchen, and they cook together while she interviews them. It’s as lovely as you think, and she’s lovely.

One thing we’re going to discuss today is that even though Ina has written so many cookbooks, she has a new book coming out, but it’s a memoir. This is a completely different lane for her. Amy and I have both read it, and there’s a lot in there that I did not know.

Amy: I had no idea what I was getting into, and I loved it.

Jen: Me too. In what you’d probably expect from her, she’s pretty candid and includes some hard parts of her story that she doesn’t talk about often. I appreciated the frank way she shared the true details of her life. We discuss her upbringing, her early days with Jeffrey, the beginnings of the Barefoot Contessa shop, and the journey of selling her cookbooks. We cover the entire arc, all the way to now, where she and Jeffrey have been married for 56 years.

Amy: 56!

Jen: 56 years! I’d say her food career worked out.

Amy: I think she’s doing okay.

Jen: I think she’s going to make it, guys. Her book is called Be Ready When the Luck Happens, and we couldn’t be more delighted to bring you this lovely interview and conversation with the iconic and wonderful Ina Garten.