Ina Garten recently opened up her iconic East Hampton home for a BBC interview. While chatting with TV personality Katty Kay, the Food Network star got super candid about her life and marriage like she never has before.
When asked about her decision to not have children with longtime husband Jeffrey, Garten admitted it was a difficult choice. “Did you know you couldn’t do what you wanted to do if you’d had them?” Kay asked, per PEOPLE.
“I think it’s much harder. [But] I don’t think that’s why I made the decision,” Garten admitted. “I’m actually writing a memoir right now, and it’s kind of looking back at my childhood. It was nothing I wanted to recreate. And I’m always looking forward to look back and realized a lot of my decisions were based on my childhood. And so I think that was the motivating factor.” According to Ina, she and Jeffrey were “just so happy together” as is.
While Ina offered intimate info about at her life in the BBC interview, this is hardly the first time she’s opened up about her childhood. Back in 2021, the culinary icon told Al Roker on his podcast Cooking Up a Storm that she wasn’t allowed in the kitchen growing up.
“I don’t know, I think my mother just wanted me in my room and she wanted the kitchen to herself,” the Barefoot Contessa star said of her late mother. “She said, ‘It’s your job to study, it’s my job to cook. Get out of the kitchen.’ So I kind of always wanted to do it.”
View full post on YoutubeInstead, she learned to cook by reading Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. “At some point, I thought, ‘I want to do this for my work and not just for fun.”
“I think what I was craving as a child was connecting with people and I felt that if you feed them, they always show up and you have a good time together,” she added. “That was the connection I loved so, I kept doing it over and over again.”