Ina Garten said her mother never let her cook when she was a kid

• Ina Garten has revealed that her mother never let her cook when she was a kid.
• Garten said her cooking career was the "ultimate rebellion" against her mother.

Ina Garten has become famous for her quick and easy recipes, but the "Barefoot Contessa" star surprisingly wasn't allowed in the kitchen as a kid.

Garten recently revealed that her mother never let her cook when she was young.

"She said, 'It's your job to study, it's my job to cook. Get out of the kitchen,'" Garten told Al Roker during an interview for his new podcast, "Cooking Up a Storm."

"I think my mother just wanted me in my room and she wanted the kitchen to herself," Garten added.

Garten previously revealed that her mother was also restrictive when it came to the family's meals.

"My mother was obsessive about food," Garten said on Katie Couric's "Next Question" podcast in 2017. "So we weren't allowed any carbs, we weren't allowed any butter. We had margarine. And her idea of a great dessert was an apple."

But Garten was always interested in cooking, and after a four-month camping trip in Paris with her husband Jeffrey, she began to teach herself with the help of Julia Child's cookbooks.

"At some point, I thought, 'I want to do this for my work and not just for fun,'" she told Roker.

And Garten did just that in 1978, quitting her job at the White House - where she helped write the nuclear energy budget during Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter's presidencies - to buy Barefoot Contessa, a small specialty food shop in the Hamptons.

Garten's parents couldn't believe she would ever give up her prestigious career to run a grocery store. The future Food Network star joked to Couric that her cooking career was the "ultimate rebellion" against her mother.

But the beginning wasn't easy. Garten had little experience in the world of food.

"Honestly, the first month I was there I thought, 'This is the stupidest thing I've ever done in my life,'" Garten told the New York Times' Sam Sifton during the launch of her cookbook "Modern Comfort Food" in October 2020. "I didn't know how to do anything. But Jeffrey said, 'If you could do it in the first week, you'd be bored in the second week."'

Garten began working 18-hour days to turn Barefoot Contessa into a success, eventually moving the store to a larger location in East Hampton. She ran the store for 18 years before selling it to two of her employees in 1996.

Three years later, Garten published her first cookbook - "The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook" - with recipes from her store.

The Food Network came calling shortly after, bringing Garten not only to our kitchens - but to our living rooms as well.