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I try to greet my friends with a drink in my hand, a warm smile on my face, and great music in the background, because that's what gets a dinner party off to a fun start.

Ina Garten

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Ina Garten
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: February 2
Author
Chef
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Ina Rosenberg Garten
Trying
Start
Backgrounds
Face
Dinner
Party
Warm
Friends
Smile
Faces
Drink
Hands
Gets
Music
Fun
Greet
Great
Hand
Background

More quotes by Ina Garten

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My mother would never let me in the kitchen. I always wanted to cook, but I was never allowed to. Her view of the world was, Cooking is my job, and studying is your job. I think, in retrospect, she didn't like the chaos. She was very orderly. It had to be her way.
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You don't have to do everything from scratch. Nobody wants to make puff pastry!
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I get up every day, do the best that I can do, and go home and have a good time.
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Food is not about impressing people. It's about making them feel comfortable.
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All my life I dreamed of an apartment in Paris where I could cook, and now I have one, on the Left Bank.
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Instead of going out to dinner, buy good food. Cooking at home shows such affection. In a bad economy, it's more important to make yourself feel good.
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I always have music. I love it to be very upbeat. When you're having drinks, I like something like Cesaria Evora. During dinner, I like the much more traditional - old Frank Sinatra and things like that.
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The planning is everything. Deciding which dishes you're going to prepare can turn into the make-or-break decision five days later, when you actually serve the meal.
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The dirty little secret is that I grew up in a household where there were no carbohydrates allowed, ever. No cookies, no bread, no potatoes, no rice. My mother was very extreme in terms of what she served. Since I left home more than 40 years ago, I've been making it right for myself.
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I always like to have flowers on the table. I think they make it look special.
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Every once in a while, a cookbook comes along that simply knocks me out.
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One of the great gifts that you can give people is to cook for them.
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My favorite fall or winter lunch is big steaming bowls of soup. I usually invite people for around 12:30 and have two hearty soups like shrimp corn chowder and lentil sausage soup, which can be made a day or two ahead.
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I've lived in the Hamptons since 1978, when I first bought my store Barefoot Contessa.
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They say that gardens look better when they are created by loving gardeners rather than by landscapers, because the garden is more tended to and cared for. The same thing goes for cooking. I only cook for people I love.
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The most overrated tool: a pasta maker. Why make it when you can buy it? It's a lot of work!
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When I wrote 'Barefoot in Paris,' I wanted to make simple recipes that you could make at home that tasted like French classics.
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I don't like sitting at a table that's too large, where everyone is too far apart. That's a party killer.
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If it's a cocktail party, I generally make five or six different things, and I try to choose recipes that feel like a meal: a chicken thing, a fish or shrimp thing, maybe two vegetable things, and I think it's fun to end the cocktail party with a sweet thing.
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Take one flower that you like and get lots of them. And don't try to 'arrange' them. It's surprisingly hard to do a flower arrangement the way a florist does one. Instead, bunch them all together or put them in a series of small vases all down the table.
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