NPR

Ina Garten: 'All My Books Really Are About Comfort Food'

Sometimes you want a really good salad, Garten says. But now is not that time. Her new book, Modern Comfort Food, is packed full of recipes for beef stew, chocolate chip cookies and Boston cream pie.
Source: Clarkson Potter

If you're feeling stressed out or overwhelmed by ... you know, everything ... this may be a good time to hear this very important message from chef and cookbook author Ina Garten:

"I often say that you can be miserable before eating a cookie and you can be miserable after eating a cookie, but you can never be miserable while you're eating a cookie."

That's Garten, reading the opening line from her new cookbook, Modern Comfort Food.

And yes, it includes a recipe for "giant crinkled chocolate chip cookies." But you'll also find soups, stews, breakfast tacos, cakes — the kinds of foods that are, in the author's words, "familiar, delicious, and soul satisfying."

Garten says that when she started writing, she knew the book was going to come out right before the election, and people would be stressed. "So I thought, why don't I do something about comfort food? But like with a modern twist, and that's how it started. Little did I know that there would be a horrible pandemic, world pandemic. There would be calls for racial justice. There would be the Supreme Court

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