The Proof Is In the Pudding
Trent Pheiffer on making every single Ina Garten recipe and how her work is foolproof. His, almost.

“Discovered that if I make 3 Ina Garten recipes a week, it will take me 5 years to make every one of her nearly 800 recipes. Let's hope Meryl will star as Ina and me in the movie ... #storeboughtisfine #inagarten #TrentandIna #merylstreep.” 

This was Trent Pheiffer’s first caption on Instagram on October 10th, 2015 as the user @StoreBoughtIsFine. It accompanied a manipulated version of the Julie & Julia movie poster, Ina replaced Meryl Streep as Julia Child above and below was an image of Trent in a blonde wig replacing Amy Adams as Julie Powell. Its title: Trent & Ina. Trent put up the second and third posts on the same day. First came Ina’s Lentil Sausage soup, Trent’s red pot was collaged to mirror a pixelated image of Ina’s copper pot, both filled to the brim with the same hearty meal. Number two was a Green Salad with Creamy Mustard Vinaigrette, “Raw egg and no salmonella!!” Trent exclaimed in the caption. 

Recipe #100: Amelie’s Jambalaya

Back in 2015, Trent’s relationship with food was in a rut. The 35-year-old spent time in his family kitchen growing up in Norwalk, Ohio, had read Julia Child’s The Art of French Cooking and had taken a dip into “Ina Land” but he hadn’t gotten as far as he wished in his culinary journey. “I had made a chicken alfredo and the alfredo sauce was a healthy version and it had mashed up cauliflower in it and it was the most disgusting dish I've ever had.” he recalled, horrified and forever distrustful of hardly tested online recipes. He decided, “Let me go with somebody I can trust.” Trent trusted Ina Garten. In the month leading up to starting the project, his first purchase was Back to Basics, Ina’s sixth book out of twelve.

Recipe #200: Lamb Shanks & Orzo

After the lentil soup, he put up a new post at least once every other day. The only major change to his feed (an impressive one) was rather than yellow hued collaged images, it was slowly flooded with brightly lit, perfectly staged (see: recipe #508, for which he sprinkled confectioners sugar all over his counter to accompany homemade marshmallows), and far more appetizing photos. Trent recalled to me, over Zoom recently, “I thought, three months, I'll be bored, and I'll move on.” He was wearing a blue button-down not unlike Ina’s signature uniform. I had been following him on Instagram for nearly the entirety of his project. 

Despite Trent’s predictions about the duration of the project, five years after the lentil soup, on December 2nd of 2020, he posted an image of Panna Cotta with Balsamic Strawberries. Vanilla-speckled, overnight-refrigerated yogurt and heavy cream drizzled with lemon zest was hugged by bright red strawberries glazed with balsamic vinegar, and of course, all perfectly illuminated and focused to blur out the ramekins with leftover panna cotta and strawberries in the background. It was recipe number 1,042.

Recipe #300: Profiteroles with French Pastry Cream & Ice Cream

Contrary to what some of his recent interviewers may have thought, cooking four Ina recipes a week, grocery shopping for them (“the hardest part”), managing to photograph the meals while the sun is still shining and sharing the images with 39,000 followers along with a wordy description of the recipe isn’t Trent’s full-time job. He admits the project takes up 20 to 25 hours of his week, but still, he’s actually Director of Development for the nonprofit Ad Council, where he’s worked for nearly six years.

Despite how busy and popular he has become over the past five years, Trent insists that, “It's funny because almost everything has stayed the same.” he told me two minutes after having received free gin a company had offered to send for him to try, in hopes for a shout-out. He continues, admitting that “It’s changed in a way that it feels like I have two full time jobs now… On the whole, it’s just that I cook a lot more than before I started this project. I wasn’t cooking much, I was going out to eat a lot, eating frozen food. So this is just, I guess, changed in that I’m more apt to cook at home than I was before.” However, he had the honor of Ina Garten herself, roughly two years in, becoming aware of his project and now occasionally posts compliments such as “Looks so good!” and “That looks amazing!!” on his images.

Recipe #400: Mixed Berry Pavlova

“I’m embarrassed to admit that I, even as of late 2012, was calling her ‘Eena, Eena Garten.’” Trent joked with me from his East Harlem apartment. But he continues, “Ina is a warm hug and that’s what initially attracted me to her... Once you get through the ‘warm hug Ina is great’ and you start cooking recipes, they’re foolproof.” Garten has stated that it took roughly six years to master a foolproof recipe for her Boston Cream Pie. Trent has yet to tackle it. He tracks his progress on a handy ten tab Excel packed with formulas that let him list everything from his own recipe ratings to page numbers to percentages left of each book or types of dishes. He’s gone through the majority of Ina’s healthy dishes and explains, “I’ve only made 70% of her desserts. So I have 30% left. And I only have 17% of her total recipes left. So that gives you a kind of idea... I’ll be drinking and eating sugar and having to go to my dentist a lot in the last year.” That’ll be February 2022. “I will have finished all of her recipes from television and the books and it will be a year before the next book comes out. So that’ll be my official ‘I've made all her recipes’ kind of thing.”

The New York Times recently wrote a feature about “How Does Ina Garten Do It?” Superfans know her distinct traditions, including the encouraging “store bought is fine” phrase that Trent appropriated for his project. After following him for so long, marveling at his determination and consistency, what I wanted to know was how Trent does it. “So there’s a lot of leftovers,” he says. Forcing himself to eat them is at the top of the list of tips. He’s meticulous about his method with leftovers and not having too many of them. He tells me, “If I can cut it in half, absolutely cut it in half. If I can cut it in one fourth, I cut it in one fourth.” Playing with measurements when it comes to baking can be a bad idea, but he jokes, “You know what, if it’s messed up, then I have a story to tell on Instagram.” He also takes advantage of Ina’s “twofer” method, using leftovers from one recipe to turn it into another. Although there are recipes he’d love to repeat, he admits he never does, at least not yet. 

Recipe #500: Coconut Cake (featuring five sticks of butter)

However, dealing with leftovers is still not always easy, and he recalls a Pear & Parsnip Gratin (recipe #396) that he was forced to eat with no one to share it with. Luckily that’s not an issue anymore, as he now has a boyfriend to share them with who also happens to have the sweet tooth Trent sometimes lacks. Alex Paige, his boyfriend and VP of Press at Paul Smith, has attempted to pay back some of the food debt he’s accumulated over the past year that they’ve been together, but Paige admits, “I’ve broken out in sweats in fear of the steak being undercooked or the fish being too dry. Complete terror for cooking for the best cook I know.” I suppose it would be hard to live up to what Alex describes Trent to be like when he’s cooking. Alex says, “Trent makes the intricacies of cooking Ina’s recipes look effortless. The way he moves around the kitchen often with two or three dishes cooking at the same time looks like a modern ballet.”

Budget wise, Trent feels it truly nets out as he’d need something to feed himself anyways. “I would say I average about $80 to $100 a week on groceries, most of which are for Ina recipes.” he says. He calls those days he doesn’t cook Ina recipes “Ina Cheat Days” and favors the recipes of chefs like Julia Turshen, Samin Nosrat and Lazarus Lynch. When it comes to organizing the leftovers, Trent admits he’s begun to catalogue his freezer contents. He says otherwise he’d lose what was in there. And how does he do it during a global pandemic? He admits he’s evolved his approach to the project, but for the better because, “This has freed me up to just experiment a little bit more.” Now that he no longer has to commute to an office, he has been cooking even more often, although he misses the ability to take leftover desserts to the office. However, he explains that, “I've always been a stickler for recipes, especially because I'm making my whole project based on the premise that I'm cooking every Ina Garten recipe as Ina Garten wants them to be cooked.” But scouring multiple supermarkets isn’t as easy nowadays. He continues, “This [the pandemic] has really freed me up to be like, ‘you know what, you don't have to have that, you’re getting the essence of the meal.” 

He does say he has the same love and passion for entertaining as Ina does, and he dearly misses being able to do so. Although he has his boyfriend to cook for, he says, “I miss the big get-togethers where I could invite all my friends over for all day drinking wine and eating five course meals and things like that.” He’s hoping he’s able to bring back those get-togethers, and make them even bigger than usual, by the time he gets to his last recipe, just like in Julie & Julia. 

Recipe #600: Devil’s Food Cake with Coffee Meringue Buttercream 

(featuring nine sticks of butter)

Now this is a big one: how did he manage to stay calm when spotting Ina Garten herself, not in New York, but all the way across the world in Paris? “It was an absolute dream.” are the first words that come out of his mouth. When he built up the courage to approach Ina at the end of her meal in Verjus back in 2018, she replied, “I heard you were in town!” Although he clearly could go on and on about the dreamlike moment, as a longtime Ina superfan myself, the best part was hearing Trent conclude by saying, “You build up an idol or somebody you really look up to so much that you wonder if they will ever actually be able to live up to the idea or ideal that you’ve had in your head of them and she did in every way shape or form and she was super great.”

Recipe #700: Raspberry Baked Alaska (hardest one so far)

For as much as this story should be all about Trent and his Store Bought Is Fine journey, “Why Ina?” is still an important question. Even putting aside the beautiful Hamptons home, successful Washington D.C. career (as if the major cooking one wasn’t enough) and loving (and for many enviable) relationship with her husband Jeffrey, Trent says, “She’s like a mom, teaching us all how to cook. And I didn’t know how to cook.” Getting more personal, he continues, “Ina is always a welcoming presence. I think that as a gay man, having seen her entire show, having so many gay friends [on it], you know that she’s a welcoming presence. And it just looks like she’s having so much fun... Ina always is talking about how food is how you show you love people, and it’s never about how good the food is, but how you make them feel.”

Recipe #800: Fresh Lemon Mousse

Although I have counted on Trent’s frequent posts and food inspiration for the past five years, and celebrate his closeness to finishing the project, no one wholly loves an ending. “It’s not going away in 15 months,” Trent reassures me. My heart warms when he says, “One of the best parts about doing this project is building this community. I feel like I’m in it with these people. It’s not me just doing it. It’s all of us collectively doing it. They’re teaching me, they’re supportive. They’re there. It’s all the people that are part of this community that really keeps me going. And that’s been one of the great things that I want to kind of continue.” He’s excited to cook Ina’s future recipes without having a timeline, as well as repeat some of his past favorites, like Rigatoni with Sausage and Fennel (#321), Fig Ricotta Cake (#608), Ham and Leek Empanadas (#77), or (to his surprise) Roasted Sausage and Grapes (#109). He’d eventually love to start developing his own recipes and update some he grew up with, such as his mother’s meatloaf, which he says is the one recipe of “his” that he’d love for Ina to make. 

Recipe #900: Chocolate Pecan Meringue Torte

Julia Child wasn’t a fan of Julie Powell and her project to cook all of Child’s recipes. Luckily for Trent, that’s not the case with Ina and his project. He believes that part of her success is the fact that she truly lives up to how joyous she is on TV. I was in luck too. Trent is as bright as his pictures and was as welcoming with me as we know Ina to be. I know being a guest on Ina’s show is a coveted role, but if I can’t have that, following along Store Bought Is Fine and what’s next for Trent is just as much fun. 

Recipe #1000: Seafood Platter (most expensive one so far)