Giada De Laurentiis Almost Lived a Hallmark Movie Life—Now She’s the Food Network’s Biggest Star

Do you have a favorite family recipe?

Yeah, my favorite family recipe was the pizza spaghetti my mom used to make. Basically, leftover pasta. We usually do it with spaghetti, but it can be any pasta. My mom would add eggs and parmesan cheese, throw it in frying pan with some olive oil, fry one side—not deep-fry but panfry—and then either flip it and fry the other side or just stick it under the broiler to finish the top. That was my favorite thing.

What’s your favorite recipe on your website, Giadzy, at the moment?

Right now, I have two things I love. When I entertain, I love creating these antipasto boards. Before I had Giadzy, I would just source and bring home different pantry items—things like truffle honey or certain types of olives—and I would create these boards from different regions of Italy.

I’ve turned them into a kit called Everything but the Formaggio, which includes the Italian crackers, eggplant caponata, chestnut honey, and all this type of stuff laid out on this beautiful Italian antipasto board, and then you buy your own cheese. 

And then the other one that is just a recipe is my Calabrian Fig Jam Crostini, which is basically just Calabrian chili and this Agrimontana fig jam that I sourced from Northern Italy. I add little Calabrian chili to spice it up and put it over a piece of brie on a crostini. 

What’s a life lesson you wish you had learned at a younger age?

Patience. I want things to happen quickly, as we all do, and I think with all the communication we can have these days, we expect everything immediately. Patience is the life lesson I’m still working on.

What has helped you in that area?

A lot of yoga. A lot of yoga and deep breathing. That has helped me find a place of peacefulness and serenity that I don’t think I had before.

How do you deal with criticism?

That’s the worst part of being in the public eye. I will say that it’s a work in progress. I’ve become a little bit more numb to it over the years. My daughter, on the other hand, gets furious about it. I keep going back to yoga and breathing because it’s really painful. It’s really hard. No matter how hard you work at distancing yourself and numbing yourself, it’s really hard when people rip you down. I just take it one day at a time; it’s just a work in progress, trying to find peacefulness within the chaos.

I mean, you get it no matter what these days. I don’t think you have to be a famous person. The minute you put yourself out there, that is the possible downside. But there’s also a beautiful side to it. There are lovely people who stick up for you and have wonderful things to say. As long as one outweighs the other, then it’s worth doing. You can’t really live this life on this planet if you don’t put yourself out there.