If Ina Garten Were Your Best Friend

Marissa Maciel
5 min readNov 6, 2020

If Ina Garten were your best friend, you’d drink white wine inside the house, red wine outside, but only when Jeffrey was around. When he isn’t home, which is always, she’d offer you a big snifter of whiskey and you’d sit on top of her amazingly huge countertop while you drank, eating brownies and mac-and-cheese.

Illustrated photo of me in Ina’s kitchen
Me and Ina — you know!

If Ina Garten were your best friend, she’d always ask you if the collar on her shirts were popped up properly. You’d always twiddle with the collar, even if it was fine, just to make sure she knew that you knew how seriously she took her collar game.

If Ina Garten were your best friend, you’d offer to cook for her at least once a month. She’d come to your house with Jeffrey and a nice bottle of wine and a nosegay of roses or hyacinths and hydrangeas. She’d ask really loudly, when she walked through the door, “What’s cooking?” and do her Betty Rubble-but-deeper-voiced laugh, and you’d laugh too. Jeffrey would pet your dogs, and then go take a nap on your sofa while the two of you would talk and laugh and cry in the kitchen. Jeffrey would always, miraculously, wake up right when dinner was finished. You’d laugh together about this, too.

If Ina Garten were your best friend, you’d go shopping at all the weird, cute, kitschy stores along the coast. She’d scrunch her nose up at you when you’d point to something really tacky…

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Marissa Maciel

Writer, Illustrator. Work in Points in Case, Weekly Humorist, Entropy Magazine, New Yorker Tiny Shouts, McSweeney’s, and more! All work -> marissamaciel.com