The Tip Ina Garten Wants Home Chefs To Know About Complex Meals

If you love the delicious, elegant, and often fairly simple-to-make meals whipped up by Ina Garten — aka the Barefoot Contessa — then you have a number of ways to devour them. There are Garten's many cookbooks that walk you through how to create these tasty dishes at home, her eponymous cooking show, and a number of quick clips on Food Network's YouTube channel. Undoubtedly, the Contessa is a wealth of information when it comes to all things cooking and dining.

But one of the things that makes Garten's food so approachable by such a wide variety of cooks, readers, and viewers is its rustic uncomplicatedness. While she'll occasionally bust out a showstopper such as lobster pot pie or rack of lamb, the Contessa is certainly known for simpler fare such as roast chicken and chocolate cake. And this isn't due to happenstance, but rather an overall theory she espouses with regards to home cooking.

With a vast repertoire of homey dishes ranging from lentil soup to chicken thighs, Barefoot Contessa Ina Garten's cooking is often more than approachable for the average home cook. And as it turns out, it's not just because Garten is catering to her audience when developing recipes, but also that this simpler fare is the type she prefers to cook for herself and for loved ones.

As Garten told Food & Wine, she prefers to dig into complex, time-consuming dishes in restaurants — not at home, where her time is limited. "There are things that just take too much time," she said. "It takes a long time to make a classic bouillabaisse or a duck confit. I love to order them in restaurants. If I spent two days making dinner for my guests, and they eat it in two hours, they can't possibly appreciate it enough. I think those are great [at restaurants]."

"Anything that has to do with a demi-glace," Garten continued, referring to the long-cooked, classic French sauce of heavily reduced bone broth (via MasterClass). "I can make a demi-glace but who wants to? I like to make really simple, absolutely delicious food that takes a couple hours to make, and I'm not crying and exhausted and sweating."

All we can say is: We're with you, Ina. We're with you on that one.