Giada De Laurentiis Taught Her Daughter the Italian Recipes She’d Need Before Sending Her Off to College

Giada De Laurentiis has spent her career introducing American kitchens to Italian cooking. This year, her most important student was a lot closer to home: her own daughter, Jade, who just left for her freshman year at New York University in August 2026.

A Lifetime of Cooking Together

Cooking with Jade wasn’t a new project born out of an empty nest deadline. Giada has said she and Jade spent years cooking together, from baking to homemade pizza nights, long before college ever entered the conversation.

For Jade, Giada has noted, the appeal was never really about mastering technique. It was about the shared time in the kitchen itself, something that’s carried through every stage of her daughter’s childhood.

Recipes Built for a Dorm Kitchen, Not a Restaurant

With Jade’s move approaching, Giada shifted her focus toward something more practical: recipes her daughter would actually make on her own. She worked for months on a collaboration with Home Chef, eventually landing on eight recipes she considered genuine home runs for bringing real Italian flavor into a beginner’s kitchen.

The goal wasn’t complexity, it was repeatability. Giada explained that a recipe only gets made twice if it doesn’t leave behind a sink full of dishes, so keeping things streamlined was as much a part of the plan as the flavors themselves.

Earlier this month, that preparation gave way to the real thing. Giada and Jade’s father, Todd Thompson, threw Jade a send-off celebration on August 9th, with Giada writing on Instagram that it was finally “time to go to college” before the family said their goodbyes.

The Bittersweet Side of Letting Go

Behind the recipe testing was a more emotional shift for Giada as a parent. She’s described structuring her entire life around Jade’s schedule for the past eighteen years, and admitted the change was going to be a difficult adjustment.

That mix of pride and sadness is a big part of why the cooking lessons carried more weight than a typical parenting milestone. Teaching Jade to make a handful of dependable Italian dishes became one concrete way to stay connected now that the day-to-day routine of living together has come to an end.

Passing Down More Than Recipes

Giada was born in Rome and has spent decades translating her own family’s food culture for an American audience, so it makes sense that her final lessons for Jade circle back to that same foundation.

The dishes may be simplified for a dorm room, but the instinct behind them is the same one Italian families have leaned on for generations: cooking as a way of staying close, even from a distance.

What Jade takes with her to college won’t just be a folder of recipes. It’ll be the version of Italian cooking her mother chose to pass down first, the dishes simple enough to actually make again, and meaningful enough to be worth remembering who taught them to her.