| Molly Fischer
Staff writer “Gory” is not a word most people associate with Ina Garten, but it does describe my experience in her kitchen. This summer, I travelled to her home in East Hampton to interview her for the Profile that appears in this week’s issue. She had planned an assortment of activities during my stay, including cooking together for a dinner party. I was assigned the task of prepping radishes for Charlie Bird’s Farro Salad, and, almost as soon as I got my hands on the mandoline, I cut a neat slice off my thumb.  Photograph by Dina Litovsky for The New Yorker While I bled profusely, Garten reassured me: everybody cuts themselves. (Back when she was running the Barefoot Contessa store, she said, it was a rite of passage for new employees to cut their hands open slicing bagels.) Her sympathy for the challenges that lurk in the kitchen has long been part of her appeal. Often, in interviews, she emphasizes that cooking is hard—she herself follows recipes carefully, and prefers to use her own, which she tests exhaustively. In the twenty years that she’s been a fixture on the Food Network, Garten has amassed a collection of breezy catchphrases—“Store-bought is fine!” “How easy is that?”—but they belie the precision and effort that go into her cookbooks. It’s an approach that has earned her a reputation for dependable results, even among novices. Although I was a poor sous-chef one-handed, the incident was a reminder of the qualities that have won Garten her following. Ever the hostess, she provided ample Band-Aids. | 
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