Ina Garten Teaches Hoda Kotb a No-Cook Recipe

After spending 17 years as a co-host of Today, Hoda Kotb is far more used to asking the questions than answering them. “I like your seat much better than this seat,” Hoda jokes. While that may be true, it is hard to stay nervous when the Barefoot Contessa herself disarms you with a beautiful plate of food.

“Did you bake this?” Hoda asks Ina as she admires the homemade mezze platter on the counter.

“No, I didn’t bake, I went to a bakery,” Ina laughs.

OK, so an almost-homemade mezze platter. Either way, Ina’s relaxed hospitality and Hoda’s gift for gab are like fresh feta cheese and briny olives. That is to say, they make a great pair.

Ina’s No-Cooking-Required Mezze Platter

Hoda is, admittedly, not an entertainer, and Ina is determined to show her that entertaining can be easy, so the mezze platter is actually a lesson in no-cooking cooking. “You basically buy all the ingredients, and then you give it your own personal twist,” Ina explains.

Once Hoda arrives, Ina reassures her that this appetizer platter is “so easy … even you can do it,” as a hesitant Hoda takes off her coat and settles into Ina’s welcoming kitchen.

Ina shares her favorite tricks, such as using store-bought hummus and dressing it up with a drizzle of olive oil and a pine-nut garnish. “Everyone thinks you made it yourself,” she tells Hoda, giving the same treatment to a container of store-bought babaganoush. “What I do is I'll take little pomegranate arils and put it on top like that,” she demonstrates as Hoda watches her sprinkle the brightly colored seeds on top. Along with these spreads, Ina is serving grilled bread brushed with olive oil, thick slices of feta cheese that have been seasoned with fresh herbs and colorful vegetables like Persian cucumbers and tomatoes on the vine.

“It’s simple. Didn’t have to turn on the oven,” Ina tells her.

“And people walk in and think you’re fabulous,” Hoda agrees.

The View From the Top

Hoda was raised by Egyptian parents who immigrated to the United States and taught their daughter that she could be anything. “And I believed it deep down inside,” she shares. That belief took Hoda further than she could have ever imagined, even if the journey wasn’t so simple. After being rejected by 27 television stations — “I was ready to quit, actually” — she finally got a job as a reporter for a news station in Mississippi. After slowly and surely working her way up to larger and larger news markets, Hoda’s big break came in 1998 when she was hired as a correspondent for Dateline NBC. While at Dateline, she received a prestigious Peabody Award for her work. In 2007, Hoda joined Today, where she worked as a co-anchor for 18 years.

In 2025, Hoda made the difficult decision to step away from her high-profile job to spend more time with her two young daughters, Hope and Haley. Hoda recounts she had an epiphany while celebrating her 60th birthday on the famous Today plaza.

“It was just like one of those magical days, and all the sudden I realized … like this is the top of the wave. I'm sitting on top, and the view is extraordinary, and I thought about that. I thought it's time for a different wave, like let's see what's next.”

Making Magic

For Hoda, who had been busy shattering glass ceilings similar to the other women in her family (fun fact: Hoda’s grandmother was one of the first female doctors in Egypt, and Hoda’s great-aunt was one of the first female lawyers in Egypt), stepping away from the No. 1-rated morning news program in the world was easier than she thought it would be.

She describes her first day at home as a quiet morning where she had gone to her home office to write in her journal when her oldest daughter, Haley, walked in. “And she goes, ‘You really are here!’ and she hugged me, and I sat on that chair and rocked her, and I was like, ‘Yes, this was all worth it.’ And it was a beautiful day. Nothing eventful happened at all, and it was magic.”

Learning to Be Yourself

Aside from her storied career as a broadcast journalist, Hoda is also the host of her own podcast, the founder of a lifestyle platform and a New York Times best-selling author of eight books, including one with the eyebrow-raising title Hoda: How I Survived War Zones, Bad Hair, Cancer and Kathie Lee. On the latter topic, she explains how co-hosting with Kathie Lee Gifford taught her so much about being herself when she first started as a co-anchor at Today. “I was trying so hard to be right, to get Camera 1 right and Camera 2 right, and get the script right, and get out on time so that everyone said you did a good job, and it was so, so horrible. And Kathie Lee just on the air, she would just launch grenades at me,” Hoda tells her.

A grenade, Hoda explains, is when the famously candid Kathie Lee would say something on air that Hoda thought was meant to be private, such as remarking that Hoda hates Valentine's Day despite pretending to like it. “She taught me just be you, warts and all. So what. Don't worry about it. And so that kind of taught me to be myself.”

Comforting Friends and Foods

These days, when Hoda isn’t busy running her entrepreneurial empire or her girls to school, she loves to spend time with her girlfriends. “I have a group of five who are my besties,” she tells Ina. She also loves to relax by eating one of her all-time favorite comfort foods: perfectly crisp fried chicken. “I feel like my body relaxing even imagining that I'm doing that,” she says.

Ina’s Buttermilk-Marinated Fried Chicken Sandwich

According to Ina, to make the perfect fried chicken sandwich, it needs to have lots of flavor and lots of crunch, so she starts with a buttermilk marinade seasoned with shallots, garlic and a whole jalapeño that has been cut in half. The chicken, which has been pounded and cut into sandwich-sized pieces, will need to marinate for at least eight hours, but to speed things up for Hoda’s visit, she has Hoda pull another bowl of chicken out of the fridge that has already been marinating.

“You did that already?” Hoda asks.

“You know, I’m Ina Garten,” jokes the Barefoot Contessa.

The next step is to dredge the marinated chicken in a flour-based coating, making sure to get it fully covered. After that, it’s “back in the marinade, and then back in the coating,” Ina instructs as she shows Hoda that the secret to her perfectly crisp chicken is the double-dipping method. “It doesn’t take any more time, it’s just another second to put it back in,” Ina explains.

After deep-frying the chicken in oil heated to 500 degrees Fahrenheit, the sandwiches are ready to be assembled, and then, best of all … devoured.

“I am telling you right now, that’s the best fried chicken sandwich … that’s insane,” she gushes. Then, right on cue, Hoda looks directly into Camera 1 and delivers another, “It’s insane,” before breaking into a happy dance.

Back to you, Ina!