For Ina Garten, queen of the kitchen and inventor of “ , store-bought is always fine — even when she’s having lunch with Hoda Kotb to discuss her new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens.” At home in her Upper East Side apartment, Garten is preparing for her guest. She walks into the kitchen to pick out a spatula she then uses to remove two tuna sandwiches from their take-out containers.
(She’d considered using her hands but decided that would ruin their beauty.) Carefully arranging their lunch on plates, the 76-year-old media darling pauses to separate the sandwich halves just so, ensuring they look as enticing as possible before artfully drizzling vinaigrette over the side salad. Her process this afternoon is a small but crucial act of care.
It’s clear it’s exactly this kind of love that’s paramount for Garten — but, as she tells Hoda, was decidedly absent from her childhood home. Garten tells Hoda that mealtime growing up was simply “about getting dinner on the table.” “It was broiled chicken, canned peas — it was never about flavor or feeling good or treating yourself,” she says of the years she lived in Brooklyn and then Connecticut with her parents, Florence and Charles Rosenberg, and her older brother, Ken Rosenberg.
“There were no carbohydrates allowed” and “no fat” in their meals, she continues, adding that her mother, who trained as a dietitian, thought they were bad for you. “But she was also very extreme.” There was als.