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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.

Ina Garten

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Ina Garten
Age: 76
Born: 1948
Born: February 2
Author
Chef
Writer
Brooklyn
New York
Ina Rosenberg Garten
Thing
Maybe
Meals
Cocktail
Trying
Five
Fish
Vegetable
Make
Party
Fishes
Cocktails
Things
Two
Generally
Recipes
Think
Ends
Six
Chicken
Thinking
Feel
Sweet
Meal
Like
Feels
Choose
Vegetables
Different
Fun
Chickens
Shrimp

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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.
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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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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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I've lived in the Hamptons since 1978, when I first bought my store Barefoot Contessa.
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I love to take something ordinary and make it really special.
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I measure everything, because I always think that if I've spent so much time making sure this recipe was exactly the way I want it, why would I want to throw things into a pot?
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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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You can get bogged down in a recipe that's got a lot of steps and a million ingredients, and it takes all day to make. And then you realize, you've just got one dish. For Thanksgiving, you want an abundance of choices, and so you want dishes that you can put together really quickly, but that doesn't mean less flavor.
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Food is not about impressing people. It's about making them feel comfortable.
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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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I get up every day, do the best that I can do, and go home and have a good time.
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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 use other cookbooks for inspiration. I must say I tend to cook from my own cookbooks for parties.
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