Ina Garten

I have a love/hate relationship with Ina Garten. Although she consistently says things that totally make me crazy, I am loyal about tuning into her show.

The Good:

• Ina knows her stuff. She had a very successful catering business in the Hamptons and she continually is spot on with most of her recipes. I
• She takes the simplicity approach and makes some relatively 'fancy' meals seem doable. She loves French dishes and because of her I tackled my first French course at home.

The Bad:

• She usually has very long ingredient lists. I like to think I have a well stocked pantry, but you can usually find 5 or 6 ingredients not on hand. That's a problem, especially when she calls for an exotic ingredient you will only get one use out of.
• You must be able to tolerate her mentioning her husband Jeffrey at least 3 times in every episode. Within no time you will know everything you could ever want to about Jeffrey.
• Ina constantly has friends over and they are either A. Flaming Gay Men or B. Over the top Jewish. She has no happy medium. I have nothing against either party, I would just like to see a little bit of a change up every so often.

The Ugly:

• Here is my biggest beef with Ina. She is NOTORIOUS for using over the top expensive ingredients in 'simple' dishes. She also constantly reminds you that if you don't use the best ingredients your recipe will be ruined. (ex: If you don't use FREE RANGE beef in your hambuger patties you might as well throw them away because regular ground beef won't be as good. OR Unless you can find the top of the line saffron for this dish, you shouldn't make it because it won't be as good). C'mon Ina, I'm all about using quality ingredients, but I just can't suck up spending $7.99 a pound for free range ground beef!
• We know you are rich. We know you live in the Hamptons...you can stop driving us around in your Benz! That's just plain annoying and you do it like 3 or 4 episodes per month.

Although I have some gripes with Ina, overall she has a great show (in my opinion) and I will continue to watch her....even if it means I'm yelling at the t.v.