I do not hate the Barefoot Contessa; that is, Ina Garten herself seems like the kind of person who is dependable, trustworthy and donates to charity.  (I don't much like her husband, from what I've seen and heard of him on the show -- don't like your wife having fun with her friends, after the way she dotes on your wrinkly old ass all the time on the show?  Fuck you, Jeffrey, you controlling bastard!  Wait, where was I?  Oh, yeah.)

As I said, I don't hate the Barefoot Contessa, although there are some things about the show that bother me.  Aside from the aforementioned Jeffrey, I don't like to think about feet in conjunction with my food preparation.   Also, the creepy porn music they play in the background disturbs me a bit.  And, sometimes she uses ingredients I'd have to put effort into finding.

However, those issues are minor and wouldn't stop me from watching her show if her lifestyle even remotely resembled mine. 

It's hard to find video of her show, but here's one:



She has no kids, no crazy relatives, she seats less than a dozen for dinner parties, no chaos, no noise -- I have no experience with entertaining of this kind.  While her parties feature polite conversation, soft music and high-brow humor, my parties feature ribald innuendos, raucous card games and Gassy Gus.

I'm not saying one is better than another, I'm just saying it's different.

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