Giada De Laurentiis on the Heartwarming Way She & Her Daughter Jade Are ‘Helping Each Other Out’ in the Kitchen

Giada De Laurentiis is here to bring the taste of Italy to everyone through Home Chef, and is teaching her own daughter, Jade, how to enjoy cooking as she heads to college in the fall.

“We just kept doing this for months until we got to the eight that we thought were home runs. That really gave people a flavor of Italy, and that would bring joy back into the kitchen. Everything’s pre-measured for them,” the Emmy award-winning chef said about her and her pal working to create the perfect Home Chef collaboration. “Keeping it streamlined so you don’t have a million pots and pans to clean. Because I feel like no matter how wonderful that recipe is at the end of the day and tasty, if you have a sink full of dishes, chances are you’re not making it again.”

Along with the collaboration, Laurentiis is all about teaching her daughter and her generation to find their own love for cooking.

And when you speak with Laurentiis, you can sense her passion immediately. She’s ready to impart wisdom on everything she can, whether it be how to make the most of simple foods, or parenting pearls of wisdom that have worked amazingly with her and her daughter.

Below, see what Laurentiis had to say about cooking alongside her daughter Jade, how college kids can make their ramen better, and how her new partnership with Home Chef is the trick to getting a taste of Italy.

RELATED: 17 Ingredients Giada De Laurentiis Uses That Are Available on Amazon

SheKnows: Now, can you tell me about why you partnered with Home Chef and how you landed on creating these specific recipes?

Giada De Laurentiis: What I loved about Home Chef is the ease and convenience of these recipes and really bringing the joy back into the kitchen. That was always my goal from the beginning, even through all the recipe testing and all the recipes I’ve ever written. It was all to empower people to feel good in the kitchen about what they could do and how they could feed their families healthy meals. I felt like they do a lot of that.
I thought it’d be a fun sort of collaboration, and one of my stipulations was to really let me create recipes that give people a tour of Italy, from the north to the south, so they could kind of taste how regional the food can be. It took us a while to kind of hone in on which eight recipes we’re gonna do because we started with about 25, and we started cooking all of them. I did it with a friend of mine because we can kind of bounce off of each other.

SK: Can you tell me about any traditions that you have consciously chosen to pass down to your daughter or any that you have intentionally let evolve in the kitchen?

GDL: Honestly, I have tried to let everything organically just happen because I have found with my daughter that the more I push her, the more she runs the other direction. She loves to eat, but she doesn’t love to cook. So when she was younger, she loved cupcakes. So I created a savory cupcake with pasta and leftover meats, vegetables, and cheese. We’d take all the ingredients out of the fridge, line a cupcake pan, and she would just put the ingredients in.
I found that if I made it fun and nutritious at the same time, then she would become more inclined to cook and eat with me. But as she’s gotten older, her taste buds have changed. Now it’s about her finding TikToks of recipes and then bringing them to me and then saying, ‘Okay, let’s make this together.’ And sometimes, honestly, Delilah, they’re terrible. But it gives us time and moments together in the kitchen.

SK: That’s really sweet. And that’s so funny that she’s like, ‘No, let’s try this!’ I mean, she has a famous chef as a mom, so that’s just gotta be the coolest thing.

GDL: I think you either have a kid who loves and follows in your footsteps or you have a kid who’s running the other direction. I kind of have a kid who’s like, ‘I don’t wanna be you. I don’t wanna pretend to be you. I don’t wanna try to be you, I wanna be me.’ So, as I prep her for college, I would like her to cook her own meals every once in a while. It’s finding that balance. I don’t wanna push her too hard, but I also wanna make it fun. So I found that social media is gonna be the only way these days.

SK: My next question is actually about college: What tips do you have for college kids who wanna create delicious Italian meals while they’re away from home?

GDL: Well, I think that for a lot of kids, it’s about pasta. They love it no matter what form it’s in, whether it’s ramen or whatever it could be. My daughter really like when she goes to somebody’s house, sometimes she’ll make fresh sauce. But let’s be honest, she really likes to open jars of sauce. So I just have to teach her: remember, sugar should not be the first ingredient in jarred sauces. So teaching her how to read an ingredient list and how to shop, because at the end of the day, I highly doubt she’s gonna make a lot of dishes from scratch the first year in college. Later, potentially, she will. But for right now, no.
We’ve sort of been moving into this like a doctrine of ramen packets. So instead of just using the seasoning that the ramen packages have, make your own seasoning. [I’m] trying to create dishes for her that are realistic, that she can actually do, and that are fun for her; and that has been the goal in these last six months.

RELATED: 31 Giada De Laurentiis Summer Cocktails & Dishes We’ll Be Making All Summer

SK: I love that you’re fostering her own independence in the kitchen as well. I think that’s really wonderful. I was actually gonna ask too, with the pasta cupcakes, is that one of your favorite cooking memories with her? Or do you have any other ones that are particularly funny?

GDL: Oh, we did that for years! We have also made pizza together, so that has been really fun. I think for her it’s about the fun of it rather than the actual dish. She wants to have fun doing it. So whether it’s a mess that we make or with the pizza, I would teach her how to like patch up all the holes if she created too many holes in the pizza dough when she was rolling it out. Or how to learn how to stretch dough rather than rolling dough. Like all of these for her, that’s fun. So, for me to sort of deal with my own ADD, cleanliness issues, and allow her to make a mess in the kitchen has been a learning process for me as well. Letting go of some of these boundaries that I have for myself has helped me in that way, and then I help her have fun in that sense. So we’re kind of like helping each other out at the end of the day.

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Before you go, check out our gallery: