Quotes from Ina Garten

I use other cookbooks for inspiration. I must say I tend to cook from my own cookbooks for parties.

I learned that the hardest party to pull off successfully is Saturday night dinner. This meal is expected to be elaborate: appetizers, first course, dinner, dessert, and coffee. People arrive at 7:30 or 8 p.m. and stay for hours - definitely past my bedtime - and they all go home exhausted.

My extravagance is my garden - it's the first thing I look at every morning when I wake up. It gives me so much pleasure.

People have more fun if they don't eat so much they have to be taken home in an ambulance.

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.

There's something really wonderful about a party where you help yourself. Of course, first you get what you really want. But 'family style' service also really encourages people to connect with one another.

Never let 'em see you sweat. Guests feel guilty if they think you've worked too hard to make dinner for them - which of course you have!

I always like to have flowers on the table. I think they make it look special.

I don't like sitting at a table that's too large, where everyone is too far apart. That's a party killer.

I've taught myself how to use good, fresh ingredients and to prepare them as simply as possible by cooking only to enhance their intrinsic flavors.

The thing about all my food is that everything is a remembered flavor. Maybe it's something I had as a child or maybe it's something I had in Milan, but I want it to taste better than you ever thought.

When I wrote 'Barefoot in Paris,' I wanted to make simple recipes that you could make at home that tasted like French classics.

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.

I worked for the Office of Management and Budget in the White House, on nuclear energy policy. But I decided it would be much more fun to have a specialty food store, so I left Washington D.C. and moved to the Hamptons. And how glad I am that I did!

If you think about a Thanksgiving dinner, it's really like making a large chicken.

The most important thing for having a party is that the hostess is having fun. I'm very organized. I make a plan for absolutely everything. I never have anything that has to be cooked while the guests are there. The only thing I might have to do is take something out of the oven and carve it.

All my life I dreamed of an apartment in Paris where I could cook, and now I have one, on the Left Bank.

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.

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.

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.

I get up every day, do the best that I can do, and go home and have a good time.

I time everything. I'm a scientist at heart.

I love Alton Brown's show 'Good Eats,' about the chemistry of food. It's really thoughtful.

I absolutely adore Thanksgiving. It's the only holiday I insist on making myself.