What Ina Garten Really Eats In A Day
Since "Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics" ended in 2021, Ina Garten, the culinary mastermind behind the show, has continued to spend her days thinking about food. She is in and out of the kitchen, constantly cooking, shopping for ingredients, and going to restaurants. She spends her time filming her television show "Be My Guest" on MAX, developing new recipes, and writing numerous cookbooks to share easy cooking with her millions of fans – and of course, spending time with her beloved husband, Jeffrey Garten. She is known for her effortless charm and simple but sophisticated recipes. But when it comes to her daily habits, what is her actual routine?
From a morning that always starts with coffee, to the post-dinner tradition of having dessert and a cocktail with her husband, and everything in between, this article dives into what Ina Garten really eats every day. Discovering her favorite desserts (apple tart, or a rhubarb crostata during spring), wine (Sauternes), breakfast (oatmeal), and more, Ina's daily routine offers a fascinating glimpse into the life of one of America's favorite culinary icons.
She always keeps some basics around the house
Ina Garten is constantly cooking. She spends her time living and breathing food; most of the week is spent testing out new recipes. With that in mind, it makes sense that there is always a rotation of different dishes and ingredients in her house. There are, however, a few ingredients that the Barefoot Contessa has learned to keep on hand at all times, whether it is because she is constantly using these ingredients, or because they have so many different uses.
"A bowl of lemons on the counter (and other citrus)," is first on the list, as the chef told Bon Appetit. "Butter, eggs, Parmesan cheese, and chocolate" are the other ingredients that are a must. Plus there are always a few things in the freezer for easy access. Soup and homemade stock always provide a quick and easy dinner at her fingertips, Grey Goose vodka for quick, delicious cocktails, and of course, vanilla Häagen-Dazs for a sweet treat.
She has the same breakfast every day
There is one other ingredient that the Barefoot Contessa has stocked at all times, and that is McCann's Irish oatmeal, which is a brand of quick-cooking oats. This is because Ina Garten eats the same thing for breakfast every day, "365 days a year," as she told Bon Appetit. The chef is very specific about her oatmeal. "Most people don't do their oatmeal with salt, and I think that without it, it just tastes like wallpaper paste. With salt, I think it's delicious," she said.
The chef explained how she cooks her oatmeal in a Q&A on her website. "I put ⅓ cup quick-cooking oats ... in a bowl, add 1 cup of water, then microwave it on high for four minutes," Garten explained. "I add a pinch of salt, a splash of milk, a little bit of butter, and a drizzle of maple syrup, and stir it all in. My favorite breakfast!" On the weekends, she makes a more complex version of this dish with fresh and dried fruit. When cooking the recipe on her show, she added banana, golden raisins, and dried cherries.
Garten always eats her breakfast with a cup of coffee with milk and no sugar, probably made by her husband Jeffrey. The chef told Bon Appetit, "He makes the coffee—really good coffee! But he gets up at four o'clock in the morning to make it, so by the time I wake up, it's been around for a while."
Lunch is always chaotic
Ina Garten spends most of her days cooking, whether she is filming her show "Be My Guest" on MAX or testing out recipes for a new cookbook. In fact, Garten told Bon Appetit in 2017, "Sometimes I test a recipe 25 times until I get exactly what I'm looking for." Because of this, lunch always looks different and usually consists of whatever she happens to be cooking that day. In her own words, "[Lunch is] totally chaotic," as she told Bon Appetit in 2014.
On the day of this particular interview, Garten and her team ate quinoa tabbouleh, "because I wanted to see how long ahead you could make it." Also on the menu was a Jewish dish called tsimmis, meaning "crazy, mixed-up something," and was basically an eclectic vegetable stew, according to Garten. The lunch was a complete smorgasbord; "they didn't go together at all, but it was delicious," Garten told Bon Appetit.
During the week, she keeps it really simple – or goes out
Since the Barefoot Contessa spends most of her days in the kitchen all day, she doesn't actually like cooking elaborate meals for dinner. Ina Garten told Bon Appetit, "After spending a whole day cooking something, I don't want to eat leftovers or ever see it again." Her husband spends the week working at Yale, so Garten has a lot of alone time. She told Bon Appetit, "I would never make a meal just for myself—I wouldn't even begin to think about it! Avocado toast with a fried egg is about the most extravagant thing I'd make." So instead of eating leftovers or cooking some new fancy meal, Garten usually keeps it simple, such as her aforementioned avocado toast, going out to eat, or picking up something from the store.
For example, Garten is a big fan of her local store Loaves & Fishes. On the day of her 2017 interview, she happened to pick up a shrimp and swordfish curry with white Basmati rice from the store. Garten also listed a few of her favorite Hamptons restaurants that she frequents, such as 1770 House, Vine Street Cafe, The Palm, Red Bar, and Tutto il Giorno. Garten explained to Bon Appetit, "If I go out, I'm a creature of habit; I go to the same restaurants all the time. I have to push myself to try something new now and then."
She likes to snack on fruit
When she gets a late afternoon food craving, Ina Garten makes every effort to turn to something healthy instead of indulging in a sweet treat. In 2014, she told Bon Appetit, "I always have a lot of fruit around, so if I get the munchies, I try and munch on fruit rather than bad stuff. Ice cream is forbidden in my house. I try not to have it around; it's always a bad temptation." While she may love snacking on fruit, she must have lightened up about never having ice cream over the years, because in 2017, she told Bon Appetit in another interview that she always keeps vanilla ice cream stored in the freezer.
Other snacks that the Contessa loves are baked fontina, roasted shrimp cocktail, chipotle Parmesan popcorn, and rosemary cashews, although these are recipes that Garten has said that she would serve to guests, rather than make for herself.
Weekends are for cooking
On the weekend, Ina Garten takes a break from cooking for work and turns to cooking for pleasure, and for her husband Jeffrey; she told Bon Appetit, "The weekend is when I spend time cooking and relaxing." These are the meals that take care and planning during the week; she told Bon Appetit, "For the weekend, I'm pretty organized and usually plan everything I'm going to make on Friday." The week of this particular 2017 interview, Garten made skillet lemon chicken and roasted broccolini, two recipes from her cookbook "Cooking for Jeffrey." She also made a vanilla rum panna cotta for dessert, and she and Jeffrey finished the night with a whiskey sour.
Garten has something different on her docket every week, but there are a few recipes that she loves more than others. She is perhaps most famous for her "marry me chicken," a recipe to which she credits her husband proposing to her, but there are other meals she loves just as much. She likes cooking comfort food such as meatloaf, macaroni and cheese (plus one unexpected ingredient), and shrimp scampi. She also has a few masterful pasta recipes tucked away for the weekend, such as lasagna and lemon capellini.
French food is one of her favorites
Ina Garten is a masterful chef, using classic ingredients like lemon, Parmesan, and fresh herbs to flavor her eclectic, multi-cultural cuisine. While her recipes jump from American to Italian to French flavors, there is one cuisine that is particularly close to Garten's heart. Garten says that Paris is the best city in which to go out to eat. In a 2014 interview with Bon Appetit, the chef said, "It's the best city I know, because it's my kind of food. I love earthy French food." Not just any French food will do, however. Garten likes traditional, rustic fare. "I don't like fancy French food as much. Like bistro food. Boeuf bourguignon, for example. Something that's just really satisfying."
In fact, Garten loves French food so much that she has a cookbook wholly dedicated to the cuisine titled "Barefoot in Paris." Her love for French food started during a four-month trip she and her husband, Jeffrey Garten, took to France in 1971. Without much money, Garten recalls the trip to Business Insider, saying, "We bought a car in Paris and spent four months camping in a Day-Glo orange tent that you couldn't stand up in." Living on $5 a day, the food that Ina and Jeffrey ate was so delicious that Ina was inspired to learn how to cook. She bought Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" when she returned home, and the rest was history.
She loves to cook vegetables
While Ina Garten can cook anything and make it delicious, she is particularly fond of roasting vegetables. When talking about her weekend cooking habits to Bon Appetit, Garten said, "I really do every vegetable like that because it's so easy, sometimes even cooking an assortment by putting three different sheet pans in the oven."
While roasting vegetables on a sheet pan is definitely an easy hack that many people swear by, Garten seems to go above and beyond – but we wouldn't expect anything less from the Barefoot Contessa. She told Bon Appetit, "Sometimes I roast butternut squash with butter and brown sugar, broccoli with garlic and pine nuts, asparagus with Parmesan, or sweet potatoes instead [of broccolini] on the side." Another of her favorite vegetable recipes is her roasted Brussels sprouts with cranberries and almonds. All of these easy vegetable recipes show off Garten's style; taking something simple and elevating it, making the most casual weekend dinner elegant.
Sundays are for soup
If it isn't clear by this point, Ina Garten has a routine that she loves sticking to. The week is for quick and easy food, while Friday and Saturday are for delicious, home-cooked meals. Sunday, however, is in a category all of its own; in the Garten household, Sunday is soup day. Speaking to Bon Appetit about her weekly routine, Garten said, "I get a massage at six o'clock every Sunday, and then Jeffrey and I have a big bowl of hearty soup for dinner." If that doesn't already sound like a relaxing weekend, Ina and her husband Jeffrey Garten finish off the evening with some time in front of the TV. "After soup, we watched 60 Minutes, which is stunningly good," she told Bon Appetit, "and followed that with some sort of TV series."
With a huge list of amazing soup recipes, there are many options to choose from each Sunday. The week of her Bon Appetit interview, it happened to be a 16-bean pasta e fagioli. However, Garten said, "I always have soup in the freezer that's hearty enough to be a meal, like Tuscan white bean, split pea, cauliflower, or Loaves & Fishes' tortellini en brodo." Ever the master of chicken, two of Garten's all-time favorite soups are her chicken soup and her chicken stew, the first being her take on a classic chicken noodle soup, and the second being the chef's response to chicken pot pie.
Even though she is always experimenting, she has a few staple dishes
Ina Garten has 14 cookbooks, an upcoming memoir, and thousands of original recipes under her belt. She adores cooking and is constantly experimenting. However, she does not expect anyone to have the time or resources to cook that she does. Garten's goal through her cookbooks and content like her show "Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics" is to share easy, doable recipes with her fan base.
Garten's biggest advice on how to be a great cook is not to cook too much. That sounds a little bit oxymoronic, but when she explains herself, it actually makes a lot of sense. Garten told Bon Appetit, "I would say pick five recipes that are really simple—like roast chicken, macaroni and cheese, grilled fish — then do variations on those five recipes." Macaroni and cheese can become lobster mac and cheese, and so forth. Five recipes can become 50 recipes with just a little bit of variation and experimentation. "I think people get too complicated and spend too much time trying to impress everybody. Just keep it really simple," the chef continued. "If you can roast a chicken, you can roast a capon, and you can roast a turkey. It's all the same thing—one just takes a little longer. I think anybody can cook." If Ina Garten says so, it must be true.
She likes to have a sweet treat after dinner
Ina Garten has a sweet tooth. In fact, she loves sweets so much that she won't go to the grocery store herself anymore, and instead sends her assistant to do the grocery shopping, because, as she told Bon Appetit, "If I go to the store myself, sometimes I end up impulsively getting the two forbidden things: Tate's chocolate chip cookies and vanilla Häagen-Dazs." She is a self-proclaimed lover of simple ice cream flavors like vanilla and coffee.
Just because these particular treats are forbidden does not mean that all sugar is out of the question, however. Garten is well known for her delicious desserts, her cookbooks home to all sorts of delicious recipes from chocolate cake to strawberry rhubarb crisp to chocolate mousse. There is one dessert, however, that she and her husband Jeffrey Garten have every single weekend.
"While we watch TV, we always have granola for dessert," Ina told Bon Appetit. Explaining how she makes her granola concoction, the chef said, "A little strawberry or plain yogurt, fruit that's in season, and Bola granola. I buy granola because unless you can make something that's better than what you'd buy, there's no point in spending the time!"
She ends the day with a cocktail
Like any immaculately elegant Hampton's wife, chef, and businesswoman, Ina Garten loves to finish off the day with a good cocktail. Unlike many people, however, she loves to make her cocktails at home and is very particular about the ingredients with which they are made. Her personal favorite cocktail is an old-fashioned whiskey sour. She explained her recipe for this drink to Bon Appetit in 2014, saying, "made with Knob Creek bourbon and lots of freshly-squeezed lemons and limes — not sour mix."
While whiskey sours are her favorite drink, Garten loves any cocktail served in a martini glass. She told The Kitchn, "Anything served in a martini glass feels like fun." During the early stages of the pandemic when everyone was trapped at home, for example, Garten posted a video to her Instagram for her 4.4 million followers of herself making a huge Cosmopolitan in an even bigger martini glass with the caption, "It's always cocktail hour in a crisis!" All of her cocktail recipes are for big batches of cocktails as they are intended to be easy recipes for when you are entertaining. "Most cocktail recipes are for one at a time, and if you're having eight people for dinner — how to do one at a time?" she asked The Kitchn.