When you look at everything you've done and how your career as a... I don't even know how to describe you, and I hate that phrase, celebrity chef, so I'm not going to use that.

-first, I'm not a chef.

-you are certainly a... -i'm a home cook. -you're a home cook. So what would you say your influence has been? You are incredibly influential. Why?

What is it? Well, thank you. I don't know that I am, but you know what I love? I love when I walk down the street and somebody leans in and says, You taught me how to cook. Thank you. That to me, it just gives my life meaning that I never expected to have. I wrote a cookbook thinking I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next after I had a special food store, but I just didn't have anything to do. So I thought, Well, I'll write a cookbook while I figure it out. I had no idea that's what I was going to be doing. It's like my life. You just got to jump in the pond, splash around, and do something, and you never know where it's going to lead to. That it led to a place where the way Juliet Child taught me how to cook, I've been able to teach other people how to cook. It's just a great pleasure. It's just extraordinary.

There's something about you, I think, and you've described it as... Particularly because all your Instagram followers are younger. Many of.

Them are younger. It's a huge range, isn't it?

It's extraordinary. Huge range of people. You've got older people, I'm sure, watching your shows from the Food Network from years ago. When I mentioned the people I'm interviewing for this show, it's always the young people who said, Oh, you're interviewing Ina Garden. Isn't that interesting? I don't think all of them even cook. People follow you who don't cook, but it's something about you and your persona. That sounds terribly granular, but it is something about your persona that people love.

I think it's accessible. It's not like first carve the pumpkin and then make the pumpkin soup for it. It's like, just make pumpkin soup and it's delicious and it's about taking care of each other. I think we need that. Young people don't have mom in the kitchen anymore or grandma in the kitchen anymore, or Grandma in the kitchenanymore, so they don't know how to cook. I think it's just one of life's great pleasures is to cook for people you love. I think they miss that.

Did you think all those years ago when you were sitting in the white house? No, not at all. We have to go back here, though, because you were in the White House working on nuclear energy policy, working in science, obviously. Clearly, something was missing. Something drove you to leave. You were in the White House, you have this job that most people would die for, a job in energy policy and nuclear energy policy. Well, I wouldn't die for a job in nuclear. They wouldn't want me in nuclear energy policy.

But why they wanted me? I don't know.

They really did. Yet something was missing.

I think a lot of things were happening at the same time in my 20s. I wanted to grow up to be Jeffrey. He was in the State Department, worked for Kissinger, wrote policy papers. I'm of a generation where women didn't necessarily go to work. The role models we had were the men that were around us. I wanted to be Jeffrey. When I was offered this job in the White House, I thought, Okay, this is what I want to do. But then I hit 30 and I just thought, This isn't me. This is Jeffrey. I love to cook. I love to renovate old houses. I love the creative stuff. I was doing that as soon as I got home, but I wasn't doing it my work. I saw an ad for a business for sale, and it was a specialty food store. I came home and I said to Jeffrey, That's what I want to do. I think we all need one person to just believe in us. He said, Let's go look at it.

You threw it in and bought the barefoot contessor, and you worked in that insanely hard.

Insanely hard.

The White House must have felt like a breed by comparison.

Insanely hard, but I loved it. I'd started five o'clock in the morning. I'd arrive when the bread Bakers were arriving, and then I would work in the store all day. Then I would do catering at night. I do five parties at night. I come home at midnight or 2:00 in the morning, and then I do it all over again the next day. I just love the energy of it. I love the creativity, and I love that it was mine. I love that instead of $25 billion subjects like nuclear power plants, it was $25. But it was my $25.

I know what it's like, that whole Washington thing, because I live in Washington and know lots of people that work in the White House. It takes quite a lot of courage and self-awareness to say, This is not for me, because it sucks you in that world where your identity is defined by, I work in the White House and I have a badge and I can get into the White House and I'm important.

-i have a key clearance for you.

-yes, exactly. I have a clearance and I'm terribly important. Then to say, Actually, I'm going to go and run a shop in the Hamptons. That takes quite a lot of self-confidence.

Let's just say my parents thought I was crazy and they did everything possible to convince me not to do it. But Jeffrey was there going, If you do what you love, if you love it, you'll be really.

Good at it. You got married at the age of 20, which is young. -yeah, totally. -even back then this was young. -even then it was young. -even then it was young. But you also made a decision, which is not very traditional, which was not to have children. You made that decision young, too. Talk about that a little bit about you knew you wanted to get married, but you didn't want children. Did you know you couldn't do what you wanted to do if you had them?

I think it's much harder. I don't think that's why I made the decision. I'm actually writing a memoir now, and I'm looking back at my childhood. It was nothing I wanted to recreate. It's so interesting to look... I'm always looking forward to look back and realize a lot of my decisions were based on my childhood. I think that was really the motivating factor. Jeffrey and I were just so happy together.

You make very bold choices.

Everybody wants to know, Where am I going to end up? Forget where you're going to end up. You don't know where you're going to end up. All you know is that if you jump in the pond and you splash around while you're there, you're going to look around and go, Oh, that's really interesting over there. I think I'll follow it where they are and see where it brings you. Somebody described it to me once that if you're in a stream and you keep knocking against the riverbanks, you're in the wrong stream. What you want to do is be in a stream where the stream carries you along. I think I'm always trying to find where that stream is where it's going to carry.

Me along. I don't know if you felt this. I felt it in my 20s that I was in a terrible rush and that I had to do, Oh, my God. Actually, I remember the first time I got pregnant, bursting into tears, thinking, No one's ever going to take me seriously again. I'm never going to work again, and that's it. My career is over. I wish I could have said to my younger self, It's okay. Take your time. -take your time. -you've got lots of time. You talked about Jeffrey and how he's always believed in you, and I know you once said that your mother tried to keep you out of the kitchen. I love the idea that you've made a phenomenal success out of the one thing you were not meant to do.

Is there a connection there? Probably. I'm 75 years old and I'm still saying, You can't tell me what to do.

Do you still find it hard, cooking?

Yes, I always find it hard.

How do you do that? You make it look so easy. Not just that you make it look so easy, you make other people believe they can do it in a way that is easy.

Well, first, I've simplified a lot of things. I make it as simple as I can. I have such a high standard for myself that when... It's just like when I have people coming for dinner, the corn is different every single time. It's starchy or it's sweeter depending on the time of the year, whether it's from the farmstand or the grocery store. I have a flavor in my head that I want everything to taste like and a texture. I'm looking for something specific and I'm miserable until I get there. I think cooking is hard because I'm hard on myself. But I keep doing it. Jeffrey once said to him, Why do I keep doing this? Because it's so hard. And he said, I think if it was easy, you wouldn't be interested. You'd be bored. You'd be restless bored. People think I'm just throwing things together. 15 minutes before people are arriving, and Jeffrey's chatting away. I'm like, Don't talk to me.

And you still have that? -i still have that. -that's still slight jumping-off-a-cliff feeling?

Yeah.