CANR
WORK TITLE: Be Ready When the Luck Happens
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.barefootcontessa.com/
CITY: East Hampton
STATE:
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CA 258
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born February 2, 1948, in New York, NY; father a physician, surname Rosenberg; married Jeffrey Garten, December 22, 1968.
EDUCATION:Syracuse University, graduate.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Chef, television host, and author. White House Office of Management and Budget, Washington, DC, budget analyst, 1974-78; Barefoot Contessa (specialty food store), East Hampton, NY, co-owner, 1978-96; The Barefoot Contessa (cooking show), Food Network, host, 2002—; Be My Guest, Food Network, creator, 2022—.
AWARDS:Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lifestyle/Culinary Host, for Barefoot Contessa, in 2009 and 2010; James Beard Award for Outstanding Personality/Host, 2014, for television show Barefoot Contessa: Back to Basics; Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Culinary Host, for Barefoot Contessa, in 2017 and 2021; named to Forbes’ 50 Over 50 list, 2021; included on the “100 Must-Read Books of 2024” list, Time, 2024, for Be Ready When Luck Happens.
WRITINGS
Author of foreword, Stonewall Kitchen Favorites: Delicious Recipes to Share with Family and Friends Every Day, by Jonathan King, Jim Stott, and Kathy Gunst, Clarkson Potter, 2006. Contributor to periodicals, including O, the Oprah Magazine. Author of column “Entertaining Is Fun,” Martha Stewart Living Magazine.
SIDELIGHTS
The popular television host of the cooking show The Barefoot Contessa, Ina Garten is also known for her cookbooks which stress easy yet delicious recipes that are perfect for small parties with friends. Interestingly, she began her career as a budget analyst for the White House, where she helped prepare budgets concerning the nation’s nuclear energy policies. Her love of food, however, led her to buy a specialty food store in East Hampton, New York, in 1978. She kept the original name of the place, which was a nickname given to the previous owner by her Italian family after watching a Humphrey Bogart film. Garten turned the venture into a hugely popular store. She sold it to two of her employees in 1996, and the store later closed in 2003. Garten, however, retained the business name for her Food Network cable show and for a series of best-selling cookbooks.
The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook: Secrets from the Legendary Specialty Food Store for Simple Food and Party Platters You Can Make at Home was released in 1999, stunning its publisher by quickly selling nearly two hundred thousand copies. In keeping with her philosophy, Garten includes simple recipes that include ingredients that are easy to find in any grocery store. Each chapter has a recipe for a platter that can be taken to a party, too.
Garten focused on the party aspect of cooking for her follow-up, Barefoot Contessa Parties! Ideas and Recipes for Easy Parties That Are Really Fun. “Simplicity is the key,” she reiterated to Alex Witchel in a New York Times article about the book. “The simpler it is, the more elegant—like a great couturier dress. Eli Zabar was really my mentor in this: all you have to do is cook to enhance the ingredients. With the first book, I was concerned that ‘too simple’ would be the criticism, but women have full lives, careers, families, houses to take care of. When they give a dinner party they’re doing all those other things at the same time. I think people feel empowered by these books. It’s all about ‘I can do this.’”
Other “Barefoot Contessa” books include Barefoot Contessa Family Style: Easy Ideas and Recipes That Make Everyone Feel Like Family, Barefoot in Paris: Easy French Food You Can Make at Home, and Barefoot Contessa at Home: Everyday Recipes You’ll Make Over and Over Again. A Publishers Weekly critic enjoyed the author’s style in Barefoot in Paris, where Garten “writes personally in a way that feels genuine.” In an interview with Peter Smith for O, the Oprah Magazine after the release of Barefoot Contessa at Home, Garten again talked about her basic philosophy of cooking, saying: “I take familiar things and traditional flavors—and turn the volume up.”
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After a series of other cookbooks—including Make It Ahead, Cooking for Jeffrey, Modern Comfort Food, and Go-To Dinners—Garten decided to write about herself. The memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens chronicles Garten’s own life, from her unhappy childhood as the daughter of abusive parents to meeting her future husband when she was still a teenager to how she purchased her Barefoot Contessa store and built it into a thriving food business. Along with describing her career, Garten also offers advice on how to enjoy and succeed in life.
“An entertaining foray into this well-loved cooking host’s illustrious life,” wrote a reviewer in Kirkus Reviews. They called the book a “lively memoir” that is “narrated with humor and panache.” They particularly praised Garten as a “marvelous storyteller.” Marisa Meltzer, in the New York Times Book Review, called the book a “story about good fortune, work and being obsessed with your husband.” Meltzer particularly appreciated the shift that happens midway through the book when “a more powerful portrait of a marriage emerges.” For Meltzer, the book was “inviting and relaxing.” In the Washington Post, Diana Abu-Jaber described the book as a “vibrant, tantalizing new memoir” that “shows readers the delicate dance between luck and hard work that makes things look easy.” The result, for Abu-Jaber, was a “romp, filled with adventure and serendipity.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
All Things Considered, October 1, 2024, Ari Shapiro, “Ina Garten of ‘Barefoot Contessa’ Reflects on Life and Career in New Memoir,” author interview; October 2, 2024, Ari Shapiro, “Shrimp Tails On or Off? Stephen Colbert and Ina Garten Have Thoughts.”
Booklist, April 15, 1999, Mark Knoblauch, review of The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook: Secrets from the Legendary Specialty Food Store for Simple Food and Party Platters You Can Make at Home, p. 1497; March 15, 2001, Mark Knoblauch, review of Barefoot Contessa Parties! Ideas and Recipes for Easy Parties That Are Really Fun, p. 1342; October 15, 2002, Mark Knoblauch, “Cuisine Du Jour,” p. 373.
Good Housekeeping, November 1, 1999, Catherine Lo, review of The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.
Hollywood Reporter, March 30, 2022, Mikey O’Connell, “Ina Garten Moves from Cooking into Chatting,” author interview, p. 28.
Kirkus Reviews, December 1, 2024, review of Be Ready When the Luck Happens.
Library Journal, February 15, 2001, Judith Sutton, review of Barefoot Contessa Parties!, p. 194; September 15, 2002, Judith Sutton, review of Barefoot Contessa Family Style: Easy Ideas and Recipes That Make Everyone Feel Like Family, p. 86; October 15, 2004, Judith Sutton, review of Barefoot in Paris: Easy French Food You Can Make at Home, p. 82; October 15, 2006, Judith Sutton, review of Barefoot Contessa at Home: Everyday Recipes You’ll Make Over and Over Again, p. 82.
New York Times, October 2, 2024, Kim Severson, “Pain and Persistence That Led to a Charmed Life,” p. D1.
New York Times Book Review, November 3, 2024, Marisa Meltzer, “Recipe for Living,” review of Be Ready When the Luck Happens, p. 9.
O, the Oprah Magazine, October 1, 2006, Peter Smith, “Dinner at Home: Ina Garten’s Idea of Home Cooking: Familiar Recipes Zinged by a Small, Simple Twist That Makes Them Unforgettable,” p. 330.
Publishers Weekly, January 15, 2001, review of Barefoot Contessa Parties!, p. 71; September 16, 2002, review of Barefoot Contessa Family Style, p. 65; October 11, 2004, review of Barefoot in Paris, p. 70; October 11, 2004, Lynn Adriani, “Walking the Streets of Paris, sans Shoes,” interview with Ina Garten, p. 71; August 21, 2006, review of Barefoot Contessa at Home, p. 64; October 15, 2012, review of Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust, p. 58; September 15, 2014, review of Make It Ahead, p. 53; August 1, 2016, review of Cooking for Jeffrey, p. 62; August 6, 2018, review of Cook Like a Pro: Recipes and Tips for Home Cooks, pp. 65+; July 20, 2020, review of Modern Comfort Food, p. 175; July 18, 2022, review of Go-To Dinners, p. 178.
Toronto Star, March 31, 2007, Marion Kane, “Love-In for Contessa.”
Washington Post, October 19, 2024, Diana Abu-Jaber, review of Be Ready When the Luck Happens.
ONLINE
Barefoot Contessa, http://www.barefootcontessa.com (February 16, 2025).
Esquire, https://www.esquire.com/ (October 1, 2024), Adrienne Westenfeld, author interview.
Washington Jewish Week, https://www.washingtonjewishweek.com/ (October 20, 2024), author profile.
I had no idea what I was getting into. In 1978, I was working in the White House Office of Management and Budget and thinking, I've got to do something more creative and fun than writing nuclear energy budgets! I came across an ad in the New York Times for a specialty food store for sale in the Hamptons and I decided to investigate. My husband Jeffrey and I drove to Long Island the next day to see the store and it was love at first sight. I had no experience in the food business - or in any business! - but I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do. I made the owner of the store a low offer, thinking I'd go home and decide if I really wanted to make such a dramatic move. The owner called me the next day and said, "I accept your offer!" Yikes! I had just bought a specialty food store!
After eighteen years of perfecting baguettes and chicken salad, Barefoot Contessa was a hugely popular store celebrated both for its delicious food and its style. In 1996, I decided that it was time for a new challenge so I sold the store to the manager and the chef. At that point, with nothing to do, I built myself an office over the store and tried my hand at writing a cookbook. The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook came out in 1999 and turned out to be the most exciting thing I've ever done professionally. Happily, that first cookbook was a surprise best-seller. By 2002, I had published two more cookbooks and started filming a show for Food Network, also called Barefoot Contessa.
By 2015, I had published nine cookbooks and filmed fourteen years of television shows for Food Network. At the same time, I had also written monthly columns for Martha Stewart Living, the Oprah magazine, and House Beautiful. I currently write a monthly column for Food Network magazine. This year marks the publication of my memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens! We live in East Hampton, New York.
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ina Garten
Garten in 2006
Born Ina Rosenberg
February 2, 1948 (age 77)
New York City, U.S.
Education Syracuse University
George Washington University School of Business
Years active 1978–present
Spouse Jeffrey Garten (m. 1968)
Culinary career
Television show(s)
Barefoot Contessa
Be My Guest
Ina Rosenberg Garten (/ˈaɪnə/ EYE-nə; born February 2, 1948)[1] is an American television cook and author. She is host of the Food Network program Barefoot Contessa and was a former staff member of the Office of Management and Budget.[2] Among her dishes are Perfect Roast Chicken, Weeknight Bolognese, French Apple Tart, and a simplified version of beef bourguignon. Her culinary career began with her gourmet food store, Barefoot Contessa; Garten then expanded her activities to many best-selling cookbooks, magazine columns, and a popular Food Network television show.
Early life
Ina Rosenberg[3] was born to a Jewish family in Brooklyn, New York City.[4] Her grandparents immigrated to the United States from Russia.[5] Rosenberg grew up in Stamford, Connecticut,[1] the younger of two children born to Charles H. Rosenberg, a surgeon specializing in otolaryngology, and his wife, Florence (née Rich), a dietitian.[6] Her home life was difficult, with her father prone to violent outbursts towards his children; she later reflected, "I think he loved me, but he wanted me to be who he wanted me to be, without any consciousness of who I am."[5] Encouraged to excel in school, she showed an aptitude for science and has said she uses her scientific mindset while experimenting with recipes.[7] Garten's mother (an intellectual with an interest in opera) discouraged Ina from helping in the kitchen, instead directing her towards schoolwork. Garten described her father as a socializer and admits she shares more characteristics with him than her mother.[8] Both of her parents were initially critical of her decision to embark on a career in food but later became more supportive.[5]
At 15, she met her future husband Jeffrey Garten, on a trip to visit her brother at Dartmouth College.[6] After high school, she attended Syracuse University majoring in economics, transferred to North Carolina State University, and later received her MBA from George Washington University School of Business.[1][3][9][10]
Career
On December 22, 1968, Jeffrey and Ina were married in Stamford and soon relocated to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She began to dabble in cooking and entertaining in an effort to occupy her time; Jeffrey served a four-year military tour during the Vietnam War. She also acquired her pilot's certificate.[11] After her husband had completed his military service, the couple went on a four-month camping vacation in Europe including time in France which sparked her love for French cuisine. During this trip, she was introduced to open-air markets, produce stands, and fresh cooking ingredients.[12] Upon returning to the U.S., she began to cultivate her culinary abilities by studying the volumes of Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child's influential cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking.[12] During this time, weekly dinner parties turned to tradition, and she refined her home entertaining skills when she and her husband moved to Washington, D.C., in 1972.
In Washington, Garten worked in the White House; Jeffrey worked in the State Department earning his PhD at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies.[13] Garten was originally employed by the Federal Power Commission and later at the White House Office of Management and Budget. Eventually she was assigned the position of budget analyst, which entailed writing the nuclear energy budget and policy papers on nuclear centrifuge plants for presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.[14][15]
While she worked at OMB, Garten also taught herself to cook and entertain while buying and renovating old houses in the Dupont Circle and Kalorama neighborhoods.[14] She used the profits from these sales to make her next purchase, the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store.
Barefoot Contessa store
Garten left her government job in 1978 after spotting an ad for a 400-square-foot (37 m2) specialty food store called Barefoot Contessa in Westhampton Beach, New York.[5] "My job in Washington was intellectually exciting and stimulating but it wasn't me at all," she explained four years later.[2] She also found it better for her marriage for her and her husband to lead more independent lives, as a more traditionalist configuration earlier on, in which Jeffrey was the head of household, became stifling and led them to briefly separate.[5]
After traveling to visit the store, she purchased it and moved to New York. She often worked 12 hour days at the business. The store had been named by its original owner in tribute to the 1954 film which starred Ava Gardner. Garten kept the name; it meshed well with her idea of an "elegant but earthy" lifestyle.[16] Incidentally, as of 2006 she had not seen the film.[17]
Three years later, Garten had moved Barefoot Contessa across Main Street to a larger property, and in 1985, she opened a second location at the newly vacated premises of gourmet shop Dean & DeLuca in the Long Island village of East Hampton.[18] In contrast to Westhampton's seasonal beach atmosphere, East Hampton houses a year-round community, providing a larger customer base. In East Hampton, Garten expanded the store over seven times its original size, from its original 400 square feet (37 m2) to more than 3,000 square feet (280 m2). In this new, larger space, the store specialized in delicacies such as lobster Cobb salad, caviar, imported cheeses, and locally grown produce.[19]
As the business grew Garten employed local chefs and bakers including Anna Pump (who later bought Loaves & Fishes Specialty Food Store and the Bridgehampton Inn). Celebrity clientele such as Steven Spielberg praised the shop in the press.[20]
In 1996, after two decades of operating Barefoot Contessa, Garten again found herself seeking a change; she sold the store to two employees, Amy Forst and Parker Hodges.[5] She retained ownership of the building itself. Unsure of what career step to take after selling the store, she took a one year sabbatical from the culinary scene and built an office for herself above the store. There, she studied the stock market and attempted to sketch out plans for potential business ventures. At the time, her website, Barefoot Contessa, became a high-profile business as she began offering her coffees and a few other items for purchase online.
By 2003, Barefoot Contessa had become a landmark gathering place for East Hampton; director Nancy Meyers chose the store as one of the sets for the Jack Nicholson-Diane Keaton film Something's Gotta Give.[19] The store was permanently closed in 2003 when the property lease expired and negotiations failed between Garten (still the owner of the building) and the new owners.[21] Garten did not reopen the shop but kept the property for potential new tenants. As of 2024, it houses a Rag & Bone location.[5]
Barefoot Contessa cookbooks
Garten at a book signing
In 1999, Garten reemerged with her attention turned to publishing. She carried on the Barefoot Contessa name in her 1999 sleeper bestseller, The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. The book far exceeded both Garten's and publisher Clarkson Potter's expectations, containing the recipes that made her store successful.[5] Garten eventually sold over 100,000 copies in the first year,[22] immediately requiring second and third print runs after the initial printing of 25,000 cookbooks were sold. In 2001, she released Barefoot Contessa Parties!, which also garnered praise and generated high sales; Barefoot Contessa Family Style followed in 2002. The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and Parties! were nominated for 2000 and 2002 James Beard Awards in the Entertaining & Special Occasion Cookbooks category. Parties! was a surprise entry—Garten was perceived as too inexperienced to compete with nominees such as French chef Jacques Pépin and international wine expert Brian St. Pierre.
Her cookbooks have many color photographs,[5] including a full-page picture facing each recipe. Some critics[who?] argue that this style of publishing sacrifices space which could be used for recipes. Regardless, her cookbooks have received positive reviews; in 2005, fellow chef Giada De Laurentiis named Garten as one of her favorite authors.[23] As of 2023, Garten has published thirteen cookbooks with more than 14 million copies in print.
The richness of Garten's recipes has long been noted, with The New Yorker calling her "America's reigning queen of tastefully-deployed butterfat".[5] In 2010, the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine criticized her cookbook Barefoot Contessa: How Easy Is That? for its use of high-fat, high-calorie, and high-cholesterol meat and dairy ingredients, naming it one of "The Five Worst Cookbooks" of the year from a nutritional standpoint.[24][25] In response, Eric Felten of The Wall Street Journal called the report "an assault on cookbooks that dare to venture beyond lentils."[26]
Barefoot Contessa on Food Network
See also: Barefoot Contessa
Garten established herself with her cookbooks and appearances on Martha Stewart's show, and then moved into the forefront in 2002 with the debut of her Food Network program.[19] After the success of The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook and Barefoot Contessa Parties!, Garten was approached by Food Network with an offer to host her own television cooking show. An early effort with Stewart's production company in 2000 proved unsuccessful, as Garten struggled to adjust to the large television crew and highly structured environment.[5] However, when Pacific, the London-based production company responsible for Nigella Bites, proposed a show with a smaller crew and a more casual setup, she agreed to film a 13-episode season, and Barefoot Contessa premiered in 2002 to a positive reception.[5][27][28]
Her show features her husband and their friends and generally only hosts celebrities who are her friends.[29] Barefoot Contessa has approximately one million viewers tuned in per episode and has posted some of Food Network's highest ratings.[6][30]
In 2005, the show was nominated for a Daytime Emmy Award in the category of Best Service Show.[31] In 2009, the show and Garten were once again nominated for Daytime Emmy Awards in the categories of Best Culinary Program and Best Culinary Host, and Garten won her first Emmy in the latter category.[32]
In the same year, Garten announced that she had signed a three-year contract with Food Network to continue her cooking show, and will release two more cookbooks following Barefoot Contessa at Home. Garten was reportedly awarded the most lucrative contract for a culinary author to date, signing a multimillion-dollar deal for multiple books.[33] She has also been approached several times to develop her own magazine, line of furniture, set of cookware, and chain of boutiques (reminiscent of Stewart's Omnimedia), but has declined these offers saying she has no interest in further complicating her life. In 2023, Barefoot Contessa, Go-To Dinners sold more than 800,000 copies and rose to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.[34]
In 2022, Garten launched Be My Guest on Discovery+ and the Food Network. In this show, she hosts celebrities for visits.[35]
Barefoot Contessa Pantry
In 2006 Garten with her business partner Frank Newbold, launched her own line of packaged cake mixes, marinades, sauces, and preserves branded as Barefoot Contessa Pantry.[36] This was done in conjunction with Stonewall Kitchen.[18] The convenience foods were based on her most popular from-scratch recipes including coconut cupcakes, maple oatmeal scones, mango chutney, and lemon curd. The pricing for the items was comparatively expensive (for example the suggested retail price for a single box of brownie mix is ten dollars). They were only sold through upscale cookware and gourmet shops such as Crate & Barrel, Sur La Table, and Chicago's Fox & Obel Market Cafe.
Other Barefoot Contessa publications
After critical acclaim and high sales of her first three cookbooks, she went on to write Barefoot in Paris and several columns for O, The Oprah Magazine. She also serves as the entertaining, cooking, and party planning consultant for the magazine. House Beautiful, a shelter magazine, featured a monthly Garten column entitled "Ask the Barefoot Contessa" until 2011. In this column, she gave cooking, entertaining, and lifestyle tips in response to letters from her readers.[37] She launched a small line of note cards and journals to complement her books, and wrote the forewords for Kathleen King's Tate's Bake Shop Cookbook and Rori Trovato's Dishing With Style. One of her recipes, 'lemon roast chicken with croutons', was featured in The Best American Recipes 2005–2006. Another of Garten's dishes was selected for Today's Kitchen Cookbook, a compilation of the most popular recipes featured on the daily news program The Today Show. For Thanksgiving 2010, her recipes were featured by Google on their homepage.[38] In June 2012, she started a Facebook blog and three weeks later had over 100,000 followers.[36] In 2019, she lent friend and author Sheryl Haft her recipe for potato latkes for the children's book, Goodnight Bubbala.
Awards and honors
Garten was selected for the inaugural 2021 Forbes 50 Over 50; made up of entrepreneurs, leaders, scientists and creators who are over the age of 50.[39]
Personal life
Her husband Jeffrey Garten was Undersecretary of Commerce for International Trade in the Bill Clinton administration from 1993 to 1995. He was the dean of the Yale School of Management from 1995 to 2005. He can also frequently be seen on her cooking show, assisting his wife with simple tasks or sampling the dishes she has created. They divide their time living in Manhattan, East Hampton, and Paris.[12]
Registered in New York as a Democrat, Garten has contributed to the presidential campaign funds of George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, John Kerry, and Barack Obama.[40] In 2004, she hosted a benefit for Planned Parenthood.[41] However, she has generally avoided speaking publicly about politics, telling The New Yorker in 2024, "I don't think I would change people's minds".[5]
Garten also sat on the Design Review Board for East Hampton, a panel that grants building permissions and approves architectural and design elements of the village. The board seeks to protect the historical district and further the overall aesthetics of the area.[42]
Garten has written a memoir with Deborah Davis, titled Be Ready When the Luck Happens, published in October 2024.[5][43][44][45]
Works
Books
The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook (1999), Clarkson Potter, ISBN 0-609-60219-5
Barefoot Contessa Parties! Ideas and Recipes For Easy Parties That Are Really Fun (2001)
Barefoot Contessa Family Style: Easy Ideas and Recipes That Make Everyone Feel Like Family (2002)
Barefoot in Paris: Easy French Food You Can Make at Home (2004)
Barefoot Contessa at Home: Everyday Recipes You'll Make Over and Over Again (2006)
Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics: Fabulous Flavor from Simple Ingredients Clarkson Potter. 2008. ISBN 978-1400054350.
Barefoot Contessa: How Easy Is That? Clarkson Potter. 2010. ISBN 978-0307238764.
Barefoot Contessa: Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust. Clarkson Potter. 2012. ISBN 978-0307464873. OCLC 776519282.
Make It Ahead: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. Clarkson Potter. 2014. ISBN 978-0-307464880. OCLC 875771003.
Cooking for Jeffrey: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. Clarkson Potter. 2016. ISBN 978-0307464897.
Cook Like a Pro: Recipes and Tips for Home Cooks. Clarkson Potter. 2018. ISBN 978-0804187046. OCLC 1044653154.
Modern Comfort Food: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. Clarkson Potter. 2020. ISBN 978-0804187060.
Go-To Dinners: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook. Clarkson Potter. 2022. ISBN 978-1984822789.
Be Ready When the Luck Happens. Random House. October 1, 2024. ISBN 978-0-593-79989-5.
Magazine columns
"Entertaining is Fun!" (Martha Stewart Living 1999–present)
"Entertaining." (O, The Oprah Magazine 2003–present)
"Ask the Barefoot Contessa." (House Beautiful 2006–present)
Television
From Martha's Kitchen: Ina Garten's Kitchen Clambake (2000)
Barefoot Contessa (2002–2021)
Chefography (2006-2010)
30 Rock (2010-2011)[46][47]
Be My Guest (2022–present)
What I’ve Learned: Ina Garten
“A dinner party is not an opportunity to impress people. It’s an opportunity to make people feel good.”
By Adrienne WestenfeldPublished: Oct 1, 2024
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Ina Garten, seventy-six, is one of the most beloved and successful figures in American culinary history. It all began in 1978, when she left her role writing nuclear-energy budgets at the White House to purchase Barefoot Contessa, a specialty food store in Westhampton, New York. In her two decades at the helm, she transformed the store into a gourmet destination for “earthy and elegant” fare, praised by local shoppers and celebrity clientele alike. Then, in 1999, she published The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook, an instant classic packed with the simple, scrumptious, infallible recipes that would make her a household name, like Perfect Roast Chicken, Coconut Cupcakes, and Outrageous Brownies. Twelve more cookbooks have since followed, collectively selling more than 14 million copies worldwide, along with Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa, an Emmy-winning television series that ran for nearly two decades. But Garten isn’t done reinventing herself—now she’s written her first memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens.
Seated in the familiar East Hampton kitchen from her TV show, she spoke with Esquire via Zoom for our long-running “What I’ve Learned” interview series, where a subject’s wisdom is distilled down to just their own words.
Roast chicken is the easiest thing in the world, and it’s also one of the most delicious.
Nobody should ever make a new recipe for guests. You have no idea how it’s going to turn out. You should make something you know you love—something you know how to do without breaking a sweat, which you know your guests are going to adore.
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When I say store-bought is fine, it doesn’t mean you can use canned pie filling instead of fresh fruit. It means you don’t have to make vanilla ice cream, because Häagen-Dazs vanilla-bean ice cream is absolutely delicious. It means you don’t have to make your own mayonnaise, because Duke’s and Hellman’s are delicious. I like to find ingredients that make it easier to cook.
Invite people you really want to see. Don’t invite people because you’re obligated to them. I have a rule: I never accept an invitation if I don’t want to invite somebody back, because then you end up feeling like, “I owe them an invitation.” And then you end up with a terrible dinner party.
I always ask people to help out. Can you serve wine? Can you clear the table? I never ask somebody to do the dishes—that’s just forbidden. But when everybody feels like they’re part of the team, that makes a good party.
A dinner party is not an opportunity to impress people. It’s an opportunity to make people feel good.
I never, ever check my luggage. If it doesn’t fit in one suitcase that can go overhead, it doesn’t go on the trip.
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Lights are really important. I think a lot of people light the store, and I decided I wanted to light the food. How many times have you walked into a store and noticed that the floor was lit? Nobody needs to see the floor. You want the floor dark so that the light is on the food.
When I was thirty and thinking of leaving a really good job at the White House, I thought, What’s going to become of me, buying a specialty food store in a place I’ve never been and a business I’ve never worked in? It’s those chances that make your life. You don’t have to decide what you’re going to be when you grow up. You just have to decide what you’re going to do now and do it really well, and that’ll lead to something else.
If you don’t take a chance, you won’t have a great life.
I have this theory that if you never fall down, you haven’t skied hard enough. I like challenging myself. I’ll be scared to death and think, How is this ever going to happen? Then I like to prove to myself I can actually do it.
A lot of people say I taught them how to cook, which is incredible, because if you cook, people show up at your house and you create a community around yourself. What I was really doing was giving people a gift to do things for themselves, and that made them very happy. People would come to my speaking engagements and bring me Hermès scarves and huge pots they had made themselves. I was like, “Why are they bringing me all these gifts?” Then I realized they wanted to say thank you for something I had given them, and that was just extraordinary.
How many times has somebody called you up and said, “I feel like cooking dinner—can you come on Saturday?” And you said, “Nah, I don’t feel like a home-cooked meal.” Never!
I don’t do things for the money. I do the best job I can possibly do on what I’m working on today, and at the end of today, I’m going to decide what to do tomorrow, and I’m going to do the best job I can do on that. It’s been my experience that the money follows. When I do things for the money, it doesn’t work out.
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I think Jeffrey feels that I’m the most important thing in the world, and I feel that way about him. And I think that gives us freedom, because I can go off and do a book tour and know that if I need him for anything, he’s there. Once, I was having a checkup and somebody said, “You’ve had a heart attack and you’ve got cancer.” They both turned out to be misdiagnoses. Jeffrey was on the way to China to meet the vice premier of China, but he turned right around and came back. He made me feel that nothing was more important. We have enormous respect for one another, and we have a wonderful time together. And that’s the whole thing. It’s not that complicated.
They have to want to be with you. I think a lot of men want a wife who’s going to take care of everything, but they want to go play golf on Saturday and Sunday. Jeffrey’s best quality is he walks in that door and he’s like, “Okay, what are we doing?” If I walk into a room and he’s reading a book, the book goes down. I always feel like there’s nothing he’d rather do than spend time with me. That’s what you want to find in somebody.
What brings me to tears? Anything that hurts Jeffrey.
That voice in my head saying, “The thing you’re about to do, you think it’s a good idea, but it’ll turn out badly”—that was not my voice. It was my mother’s voice. I think I was forty before I came to that conclusion.
People who are incredibly criticized as children carry around a lot of shame. You have to separate yourself from that, and it’s very hard to do.
I love that we live in an era when women can be strong and feminine. A lot of my interests are very feminine interests. I’m not going to throw them out just because I’m a feminist. I love gardening. I love cooking. I’ve made a business out of it because I love doing it. I’ve really reveled in the freedom that women have to do things. We just need to surround ourselves with people who understand that.
I hope when people remember me, they say, “She had a very good time.”
In Her Long-Awaited Biography, Superstar Chef Ina Garten Opens up About Her Abusive Jewish Parents
By JTA -October 20, 20240
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Photo of a book cover featuring a woman with shoulder-length straight brown hair sitting at a kitchen table and resting her head on one hand. behind a striped blue and white mug. White text reads "Ina Garten" and below that, in smaller white font, "Be Ready When the Luck Happens."
Ina Garten’s new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” hit bookstores this month. Cover courtesy of Crown via JTA.org.
Rachel Ringler | JTA.org
It was, I thought, a Jewish food writer’s dream assignment. Nearly four years ago, during the first autumn of the COVID pandemic, I sat down (virtually) with food superstar Ina Garten to learn about her childhood memories of home, family and food — and the impact those memories had on her career as a widely beloved foodie, television personality and author of, at that time, 12 enormously successful cookbooks.
The interview was for The Nosher, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s partner food site, and as such I was particularly interested in hearing about Garten’s Jewish food memories. Given the number of classic Ashkenazi recipes she has in her books — from chopped liver to stuffed cabbage, chicken soup to rugelach — I was sure there was lots to unpack. So I asked what I assumed was a softball question to get the conversation going: Do you have memories of your childhood kitchen and food?
“I don’t. I didn’t have the happiest childhood,” Garten told me.
Garten is known for her velvety voice and easy laugh, and her books are filled with quotes about the role that a home plays in one’s life and how the kitchen is the heartbeat of the house. So I was shocked to learn that her life before she met Jeffrey Garten, her husband of 56 years, was unhappy and that it was a subject from which she stayed away.
“I think a lot of what I do is creating what I always wanted rather than a memory of something,” she said then. “The minute I got married I really started cooking. I was never allowed to cook. I was never allowed in the kitchen.”
Lucky for Garten’s fans, in the years since that interview, Garten has apparently reconsidered her reticence. In her new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” Garten opens up about her painful childhood, first in Brooklyn and then in Stamford, Connecticut, and the winding road that led her to carving out a place in the food world.
Her love of cooking and hosting clearly didn’t come from her mother. Garten describes her
mother as emotionally detached, a person who “cooked and didn’t enjoy it.” Garten’s father, a physician, was tall and handsome, but with a dark streak to his personality.
“When he got angry,” she wrote, “which was often, anything could happen. He’d hit me or pull me around by my hair.” Their parenting style was tyrannical. Her mother’s approach to child-rearing was, wrote Garten, “basically making sure that we [ my brother and I] did what she thought we were supposed to do.” They generally disapproved, she wrote, of any decision she made that was different from theirs.
It wasn’t all cruel and unhappy. Garten has warm memories of her paternal grandparents, Bessie and Morris Rosenberg, who spoke only Yiddish when they arrived in America from Russia and Poland.
Bessie was “always cooking, and like all good cooks, she was happiest when she was feeding people,” Garten writes. “Her steaming pots were filled with traditional Jewish dishes that were probably overcooked and under seasoned, but simple and delicious.”
Bessie Rosenberg died when Ina was still young and other than her description of her grandmother, whom Garten says she resembles, there are no warm family- or food-related memories in this memoir — until Jeffrey Garten enters the scene.
The couple met as teenagers – she was in high school, he was a freshman at Dartmouth College. They married when she was 20, and he was 22. In their first apartment, Garten told me, the first thing she did was buy furniture and rugs.
“I wanted to create an environment that felt warm and cozy because I was hungry for it,” she said.
As a newlywed, Garten took flying lessons, worked in a women’s clothing store, finished college, traveled through France with Jeffrey on $5 a day and then moved to Washington, D.C. There she worked for the White House by day and returned home in the evening to recreate some of the memorable dishes they had eaten during their travels in Europe.
As her boredom with her government job grew, Garten searched for her next gig — one in which she could be her own boss. “I’m a terrible employee,” she writes, “because I hate being told what to do — that’s what my life was like growing up!”
Garten came across a small ad in The New York Times for a “Catering, Gourmet Foods, and Cheese Shoppe” in the Hamptons. She loved its name — Barefoot Contessa — made an offer to purchase it, which was accepted, and began the next trajectory of her life.
It was a pivotal point for her career, yielding success at her first Barefoot Contessa store in Westhampton, then in a move to another down the street, then moving farther east to open another food store in East Hampton.
Despite her growing renown, Garten was plagued with self-doubt, and she came to realize that the critical voice in her head was, she wrote, “actually my parents’ voice, not mine.”
She went on, “It’s really hard to separate yourself from that voice, but I started telling myself, That’s what my mother would have said. Everything you’ve done has come out better than you could have imagined, so listen to your own voice.”
In 1996, at age 48, Garten stepped away from the retail food business. She pivoted to do what her customers and friends had been begging her to do: write a cookbook. “I wanted to make easy recipes that anyone could prepare and know their guests would be delighted,” she wrote.
The book she produced — “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook,” published in 1999 — was unlike others on the market. It had only 75 recipes and lots of full-page photographs. It was the first of 13 cookbooks and, over the course of more than 25 years of writing them, more than 13 million copies have been sold.
“The food we enjoy most connects to our deepest memories of when we felt happy, comfortable, nurtured,” Garten writes. “It could be something from childhood (definitely not my childhood — my mother, who was a trained nutritionist, never served anything remotely comforting!) or a taste that somehow made us feel good, even if we didn’t know why.”
In ''Be Ready When the Luck Happens,'' the TV cooking icon asks, ''How easy is that?'' The answer? Not very.
BE READY WHEN THE LUCK HAPPENS: A Memoir, by Ina Garten
Many books open with epigraphs. Maybe Plato, the Bible or Oscar Wilde; usually lofty, and generally by a long-dead stranger.
Ina Garten begins her memoir, ''Be Ready When the Luck Happens,'' with the following: ''Do what you love. If you love it, you'll be very good at it.''
It's attributed to her husband, Jeffrey Garten, familiar to fans as a loving, steady presence and a key part of Ina Garten's brand as a wildly successful cookbook author and TV personality.
The quote from Mr. Garten, a noted economist better known to viewers as an affable and hungry helpmeet, does indeed sum up the themes of his wife's book -- and serves as a good barometer for your enjoyment of it. This is a story about good fortune, work and being obsessed with your husband.
Garten's gift has been to make everything look effortless: the recipes in her 13 cookbooks; the glorious array of salads and cupcakes in her former food store, Barefoot Contessa; the many occasions when she's advised viewers to substitute store-bought items for homemade on the Food Network. In this memoir, however, she shows how much luck and labor it took to achieve the success that she clearly enjoys.
Instead of beginning chronologically, or even in medias res, Garten opens when her life really started: in 1965, when she is a high school senior and Jeffrey Garten a sophomore at Dartmouth.
We move to 1978, when she spots an ad in the Sunday New York Times. It's for a catering and food shop in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa, named after an Ava Gardner movie, that promises to ''gross over six figures in summer alone.''
She buys it for $20,000 despite working in Washington, D.C., and having no real experience in the food industry. It works out. ''You bake cookies, you sell cookies, and if the cookies don't sell, you make something else that customers will love and that WILL sell,'' she writes. ''It's a business problem to solve, and it involved chocolate chip cookies.''
With this back story established, she returns to her beginnings. She was born Ina Rosenberg to a Jewish family and from the age of 5 lived in Stamford, Conn. Her father was a stylish surgeon with a big personality; her mother was slim and anxious. Ina was not encouraged to be close to her brother, Ken. ''We were raised as if we were only children, with little interaction between us.'' Dinnertime was bland and abstemious: plain broiled chicken or fish, steamed broccoli, canned peas and carrots and questions like, ''What did you accomplish today?''
And then there was her father's volatility and abuse. ''He'd hit me or pull me around by my hair. Then, as if shocked by his own behavior, he'd leave the house, or go down to the basement until he could compose himself.'' She vowed that if a future partner ever raised his voice or hand to her, she would immediately leave.
When she meets Jeffrey Garten, he tells her he thinks she needs to be taken care of -- and volunteers to be that someone. She devotes herself to Jeffrey, which she admits was retrograde even for the era. ''College girls were burning their bras and women were trying to get out of the kitchen. And what was I doing? I was demanding that my mother let me into the kitchen to bake brownies to send to my boyfriend!'' (Garten keeps this signature conversational tone throughout, including plenty of italics and exclamation points.)
After they marry, she follows him to a military base in North Carolina, but things really come alive for them after he gets out and they take a long road trip, camping all over Europe. She claims they were never bored, sick or had a bad day. Perhaps this was because of the food they discovered: Gariguette strawberries, Cavaillon melons, Poilne bread, rotisserie chickens.
When she buys Barefoot Contessa (after a few boring jobs in D.C.), she brings some of that abundant Euro grocery energy to her shop, the roast chicken served in picnic-ready checked paper containers. She adds curry to chicken salad and experiments with sun-dried tomatoes and fennel. She throws her devoted staff Olympics-themed parties with bagel tosses and a flaming duck torch. Estée Lauder shows up in white gloves and orders barbecued ribs.
Garten finds a professional purpose but realizes what she lacks is independence. ''There was the sense in our marriage that he was the parent, and I was the child,'' she writes. ''Then, when I went out in the world and started working, the dynamic shifted, and our roles became 'man' and 'wife.''' They separate.
''And just like that, I was alone.''
This is the moment when the Jeffrey hagiography finally ends and a more powerful portrait of a marriage emerges. It would have been easy for Garten to gloss over this part of her life, or to omit it all together. But it's truly inspiring to read how they gradually come back together. And it's proof that the perfect relationship they show onscreen was hard-earned.
After that, her challenges seem conquerable. When she feels burned out, she decides, with help from her therapist, that what she needs is to drive a convertible and get massages. (Said therapist later stops practicing and becomes Garten's ''dear friend and trusted adviser'' -- I would love a documentary on that relationship alone.)
She publishes a first cookbook that becomes a runaway success, and in short order becomes a TV star. By now, we understand that Ina Garten is both a born hustler and an all-around luck magnet who can conjure loans and waterproof tents seemingly at will. When she devotes a large portion of the book to the challenges of finding the perfect Left Bank pied-à-terre, we're rooting for an easy solution to Garten's champagne problems.
None of us is Ina Garten. And yet, she has created an inviting and relaxing world that's the equivalent of one of her cocktail recipes. To use a Barefoot Contessa catchphrase, How great is that?
BE READY WHEN THE LUCK HAPPENS: A Memoir | By Ina Garten | Crown | 310 pp. | $34
CAPTION(S):
PHOTO: Ina Garten (PHOTOGRAPH BY THOMAS ECKERLE) This article appeared in print on page BR9.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The New York Times Company
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Meltzer, Marisa. "Recipe for Living." The New York Times Book Review, 3 Nov. 2024, p. 9. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A814549034/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=b1f6e619. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Garten, Ina BE READY WHEN THE LUCK HAPPENS Crown (NonFiction None) $34.00 10, 1 ISBN: 9780593799895
The popular cookbook author and Food Network star looks back on a life filled with hard-won opportunities.
For those who may have wondered if Garten's life is truly as fabulous as depicted in her East Hampton-based cooking show, rest assured: it most certainly is. Garten's memoir chronicles a remarkably productive, well-lived life filled with exciting travel, notable career opportunities, enviable home properties, celebrity friendships, and delicious food--lots of delicious food (an advisory note to have something to nosh on while reading). There's also her husband, Jeffrey. Their marriage, spanning half a century, serves as a rock-solid foundation in her life. Narrated with humor and panache, Garten proves to be a marvelous storyteller. Though her journey is extraordinary and often inspiring, there were certainly bumps along the way. Growing up in suburban Connecticut with intensely cold, unloving parents, Garten recounts her experiences as a smart, ambitious, modern woman aiming to make something of herself within the restrictive confines of the 1960s and '70s, when the only thing expected of a woman was to marry a successful man. Though she found that in Jeffrey, their relationship took some time to evolve into an equal partnership. After years of floundering in high-level roles, including as a budget analyst at the White House, Garten launched the career of her dreams with Jeffrey's support. She purchased the Barefoot Contessa specialty food store in West Hampton, diving into the food business. Years of hard work led to expanding and relocating to East Hampton. Her success spawned bestselling cookbooks and eventually her cooking show. Though a good deal of luck often came through for her along the way, Garten's lively memoir emphasizes how hard work and unrelenting tenacity were what made the magic happen.
An entertaining foray into this well-loved cooking host's illustrious life.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Garten, Ina: BE READY WHEN THE LUCK HAPPENS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Dec. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A817945677/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=71633776. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Byline: Diana Abu-Jaber
For years, Ina Garten's catchphrase âHow easy is that?â has reassured multitudes of viewers that they, too, could roast a glorious chicken or bake a seductive brownie. Now, the beloved cookbook author and Food Network star has written a new kind of book. In her vibrant, tantalizing new memoir, âBe Ready When the Luck Happens,â Ina shows readers the delicate dance between luck and hard work that makes things look easy.
Ina's devoted husband, Jeffrey, has a line that reappears throughout the memoir: âYou never know your good breaks from your bad ones.â Meaning, essentially, that every setback can lead to a new opportunity. Jeffrey's an intellectual and academic, a planner. But Ina's a jumper - intuitive, impulsive and pretty darn fearless. Forged in the crucible of a home with emotionally and physically abusive parents, Ina tends to doubt herself and her abilities. Yet she also reveals a fiercely independent streak, a kind of grit that enables her to hear the voice beneath her insecurity and stand up for herself.
Anyone who has viewed her program, âBarefoot Contessa,â knows how she dotes on Jeffrey. Here she credits him with lifting her out of a lonely childhood and giving her a chance at real happiness. Ina was a teenager in high school when she met her future husband, an undergraduate at Dartmouth. Jeffrey was, in many ways, a traditionalist. On their wedding night, he found himself overcome with a sense of obligation. âAs Jeffrey confessed to me years later, one terrifying thought crossed his mind,â she writes: âOh my God, I'm responsible for this person. I have to make sure she keeps breathing!â
These gender roles started to feel limiting to both of them. After all, Ina never took kindly to boundaries. In an anecdote about being kept out of squash courts, she writes, âThe architects had made the entrance to the courts through the men's locker room so there was no way for a woman to access them. ⦠I wanted to do what I wanted to do without any barriers standing in my way.â Indefatigable, Ina sneaked through the men's locker room and learned how to play squash.
She also worked in the White House, learned how to fly a plane and spent months tent-camping across Europe with Jeffrey. Her professional turning point came when she answered a newspaper listing and drove to Westhampton Beach, N.Y., to make an offer on a little food shop called the Barefoot Contessa. She had never worked in the food industry and had no professional training, but she was entranced by the shop's smell of freshly baked cookies and felt a deep pull toward the place that would end up becoming the launchpad for her extraordinary career. The more success she experienced, the more she chafed against the limits of old roles. Eventually her marriage became so strained, Ina thought it might not last. She confronted Jeffrey with her dissatisfaction and they managed over time to co-create a freer, more equitable relationship.
A willingness to trust her intuition and a readiness to take creative yet audacious risks is at the heart of Ina's genius. In this sense, âBe Ready When the Luck Happensâ is less of a contemplative culinary memoir in the tradition of authors like M.F.K. Fisher and Ruth Reichl and more of a freewheeling handbook for life. Over and over, Ina demonstrates the importance of honoring one's instincts. Brilliant at outsourcing and connecting people, she makes an art of finding the best of everything, from ingredients to properties to contractors. The book loses some of its texture and depth when the Gartens become more established and dive into the world of renovations, interior design, swanky parties and celebrities. Then again, this is part of what makes Ina singular; a visual master, she is adamant that presentation is essential in evoking an experience - whether in a dish, a cookbook or a cooking show. Her low purr of a voice, her velvety eyes and her warm yet imperious presence embody the Barefoot Contessa brand.
But make no mistake, Ina knows food. Her memoir sings when she describes her process of testing and perfecting recipes. Once, preparing a lentil soup, she sensed something was missing. In a flash of inspiration, she added a couple tablespoons of red wine vinegar: âThe edge of the acidic but flavorful vinegar really brought out all the flavors of the soup,â she writes. âA small splash of the right ingredient transformed a perfectly good soup into something bold and bright that you couldn't stop eating.â
Like Julia Child before her, Ina Garten is an artist, dedicated to democratizing recipes for home cooks. In her memoir, she claims to be lucky, but she also reveals the deep thinking and testing that goes into the work of creating wonderful dishes. âBe Ready When the Luck Happensâ is a romp, filled with adventure and serendipity, a magic act that makes the hard stuff of life seem like both education and play.
And how easy is that?
- - -
Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of âBirds of Paradise,â âOriginâ and the culinary memoir âLife Without a Recipe.â Her most recent book is âFencing with the King.â
- - -
Be Ready When the Luck Happens
A Memoir
By Ina Garten
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 The Washington Post
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Abu-Jaber, Diana. "Ina Garten's âBe Ready When the Luck Happens' is a handbook for life." Washington Post, 19 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A812818174/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8caba059. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
HOST: ARI SHAPIRO
ARI SHAPIRO: Funny coincidence - Stephen Colbert and Ina Garten both have new books out. He wrote a cookbook with his wife, Evie, called "Does This Taste Funny?" She wrote a memoir called "Be Ready When The Luck Happens."
The odd thing is, Stephen Colbert and Ina Garten each mention each other in their books - they're friends. So when I recently interviewed Colbert, I asked if he had a question for his fellow author.
STEPHEN COLBERT: Ina, this is Stephen Colbert. Hi. How's Jeffrey?
INA GARTEN: (Laughter).
COLBERT: That's not the question. I just wanted to know how Jeffrey is. I'm a huge Jeffrey fan. I'm a Jeff-head.
SHAPIRO: Of course, Jeffrey is Ina Garten's husband of more than 50 years. But Colbert actually did have a real question. And as a postscript to our full-length interview that aired yesterday, here it is.
COLBERT: Sometimes - and we talked about this the last time we were together - sometimes you leave the tails on shrimp when you serve them, even with a sauce.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
COLBERT: And you know how I feel about this. I forgot what your reason was. And I'm just curious, in the least hostile possible way, why you would do that.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) Before we get to the Jeffrey question, let's tackle the shrimp.
GARTEN: (Laughter) I love that question. I love him. He's just the best.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) He has strong feelings about tail-on shrimp in sauce.
GARTEN: And do you know this - when the book "Cooking for Jeffrey" came out - do you know this story?
SHAPIRO: No.
GARTEN: When the book "Cooking For Jeffrey" came out - and that's how we actually met each other - he was tweeting, when are you going to write a book called "Cooking For Stephen"?
SHAPIRO: (Laughter)
GARTEN: So (laughter) my publicist and dear friend, Kate Tyler, took a book of "Cooking For Jeffrey" and replaced Stephen with Jeffrey in every place, including the photographs. So I was sitting in a car with Stephen Colbert.
SHAPIRO: Whoa, like photoshopped Stephen's head on Jeffrey's head (laughter)?
GARTEN: Exactly (laughter). Exactly. So adorable.
SHAPIRO: That is so sweet.
GARTEN: (Laughter)
SHAPIRO: And yet, the shrimp - the shrimp divide.
GARTEN: OK.
SHAPIRO: The shrimp divide.
GARTEN: So this is how I feel about the shrimp. If you're going to pick up the shrimp by the tail and eat it and then throw the tail away, that's fine. But if you're using shrimp in a dish where you're going to eat it with a knife and fork, it definitely shouldn't have tails on it.
SHAPIRO: OK, so you and he are on the same page about this.
GARTEN: I...
SHAPIRO: If shrimp is in a pasta with a sauce, no tails.
GARTEN: Exactly. It should have no tails. And now I'm going to have to go look back through my books and see, at what point did I make that decision? If there are any recipes that have shrimp with tails on them, they shouldn't be.
SHAPIRO: (Laughter) I also want to follow up on his first question - how's Jeffrey? - because Jeffrey is the supporting actor in this drama. You have been married for more than 50 years. He is such a key part of this story. How's Jeffrey?
GARTEN: Jeffrey's good. Jeffrey's like the Rock of Gibraltar. He's smart and funny and accomplished and totally believes in me. And I feel that everybody needs somebody who really believes in them to be successful. And Jeffrey took somebody who was really very insecure and helped me find my voice.
SHAPIRO: Ina Garten's new memoir is "Be Ready When The Luck Happens," and Stephen Colbert's cookbook with his wife, Evie, is "Does This Taste Funny?"
(SOUNDBITE OF MAC MILLER SONG, "THE MILLER FAMILY REUNION")
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions page at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
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"Shrimp tails on or off? Stephen Colbert and Ina Garten have thoughts." All Things Considered, 2 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810953109/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=a16f4b79. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
It's unnerving to watch Ina Garten get weepy.
We were at the dining table in her Park Avenue apartment, sharing a chicory salad and a few sandwiches from Sant Ambroeus. (Store-bought was fine, really.)
Her memoir, ''Be Ready When the Luck Happens,'' which comes out Oct. 1, is already receiving a lot of attention. But not the kind she was hoping for.
The book recounts a life just as fabulous as it seems on her shows ''The Barefoot Contessa'' and ''Be My Guest.'' There were homes to remodel, trips to take and adventures to be had. It is also a case study on the sweat, savvy and risk-taking required for a woman raised in the housewife era to build a multimillion-dollar media empire that started with a tiny specialty-food shop in the Hamptons named after a 1954 Ava Gardner movie.
But all anyone -- including People magazine and the New York Post -- seemed to be talking about was the time she nearly ended things with her husband, Jeffrey, 77, the affable financier turned Yale economics professor, and her violence-filled childhood that emphasized accomplishment over affection.
Ms. Garten, 76, has published 13 meticulously tested cookbooks, which have sold more than 13 million copies. Although she is something of a natural writer, Ms. Garten never intended to write a memoir. ''She had to be convinced because she truly thought no one would be interested,'' said Deborah Davis, her co-author and a longtime friend. Ms. Davis laid it out in language Ms. Garten understood. Writing her memoir was about control.
''If you don't tell your own story,'' Ms. Davis said, ''other people will do it for you.''
Ms. Davis asked tough questions. Some of them were about a subject Ms. Garten had no interest in discussing: her childhood, which she and her older brother largely spent alone in their rooms.
Her mother was a cold woman who managed the family's apartment buildings. Her approach to nutrition was as strict as she was. Margarine, no butter. Fish and boiled peas for dinner, and sardine sandwiches for lunch.
''She was just emotionally incapable of having a relationship,'' Ms. Garten said.
Her father was a stylish, gregarious surgeon who had moved the family from Brooklyn to Connecticut when Ms. Garten was 5. He also had an anger management problem. He hit young Ina Rosenberg frequently, and sometimes even dragged her by the hair.
''When I got older, I thought about hitting back,'' Ms. Garten said. ''But I was afraid he would lose it.'' She finally did when she was a sophomore in college, after he hit her for staying out late. ''That was really the most courageous thing I'd ever done. And he never did it again.'' Years later, he would apologize and the two made peace.
Even the most amateur psychologist could put it together. Ms. Garten has dedicated her career to creating a paragon of domestic warmth that is precisely what her childhood wasn't. She conjured a welcoming place where no one turns down an invitation and everyone has fun.
Back at her dining table, Ms. Garten grew emotional. ''It just occurred to me while you're talking about this that I must have gotten over the feeling of shame,'' she said, tears in her eyes. ''I don't want people to feel that their childhood needs to be their life story. You can write your own story. You are not who your parents thought you were, or whatever bad thing that happened to you.''
Still, she'd like everyone to move on to other parts of the book. (Like how her success is in large part because she doesn't take no for an answer.) ''People have written fabulous memoirs, and in the middle of it is some sexual abuse by a next-door neighbor, and that's all anybody talks about,'' she said.
The memoir took four years. Ms. Davis played the role of archaeologist, therapist and detective, traveling with Ms. Garten to former homes and poring through boxes of the lyrical letters Mr. Garten wrote when they first started courting. He kept them up through his military tours and global business travel. ''He was like Samuel Pepys,'' Ms. Davis said.
Their relationship trouble came in the 1970s, when women began to realize divorce was a reasonable answer to the question ''What is wrong with my life?'' Ms. Garten took him for a walk on the beach and dropped the bomb. She wanted a separation.
She was 30 and had recently left her job writing nuclear-energy policy papers for the White House to take over the Barefoot Contessa, a 400-square-foot shop in Westhampton Beach, New York. Jeffrey was commuting on the weekends from Washington, D.C., where he worked for Cyrus Vance, President Jimmy Carter's secretary of state.
Ms. Garten was exhausted and elated by her new career. But she could see that once the store closed for the season and she returned to their home in Washington, she and Jeffrey would fall right back into the roles they had assumed when they married a decade earlier.
''It wasn't the stupid chores that bothered me,'' she writes. ''It was the feeling that I wasn't an equal partner in our marriage.''
Slamming on the brakes was terrifying. She had been madly in love with him since she was a high school girl in Connecticut and he was a freshman at Dartmouth. ''Everything changed when I met Jeffrey,'' she writes. ''This is when my life began.''
Spoiler alert: They worked it out. They will celebrate their 56th wedding anniversary in December.
When ''The Barefoot Contessa,'' her first Food Network show, debuted in 2002, Jeffrey started making appearances as a taste tester. In 2016, she devoted an entire book to him: ''Cooking for Jeffrey.'' Over the years, they have become the nation's premier aspirational boomer couple, complete with a fabulous apartment in Paris (that she fully remodeled, of course).
Their social circle is equally enviable. She has a ridiculous number of famous friends from the worlds of architecture and art to Hollywood. Jennifer Garner is a close friend. She has talked boyfriends and business with Taylor Swift, who owns all of her cookbooks. The actor Emily Blunt says her roast chicken -- famously called engagement chicken -- helped win her husband John Krasinski's heart.
Many of those friends have appeared on her latest Food Network show, ''Be My Guest.'' In the sixth season, which debuts on Sept. 29, the actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Wendell Pierce visit the vast, tasteful East Hampton barn that serves as her work space for a day of cooking.
Still, Ms. Garten doesn't seem to get how famous she is. ''A director said to me once, 'You are the only star I know who doesn't want to be a star,''' she said.
The roots of that reluctance run deep. She was terrified to send an Instagram message to the author Ann Patchett asking her to be on the show, for instance.
''It was a huge risk to ask Ann Patchett, because for Ann to turn me down would be very hard on me because of my background,'' she said. ''And yet I do it anyway. I just pull my courage together and I do it and I think, what's the worst thing that can happen? She can say no, right?''
Of course she said yes.
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CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: bove, Ina Garten, whose memoir, left, was released Tuesday. Above left, Ms. Garten and her husband, Jeffrey Garten. They fell in love when she was in high school in Connecticut and he was a freshman at Dartmouth, right, and have been married for 55 years. Below, when Ms. Garten bought the Barefoot Contessa shop in Westhampton Beach, N.Y., in 1978, it was only 400 square feet. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; VIA INA GARTEN; CROWN PUBLISHING GROUP) (D9) This article appeared in print on page D1, D9.
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Severson, Kim. "Pain and Persistence That Led to a Charmed Life." New York Times, 2 Oct. 2024, p. D1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810813299/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ce742604. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
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HOST: ARI SHAPIRO
ARI SHAPIRO: Ina Garten has built a career as the Barefoot Contessa, making simple, good food that people can eat at home. There are the TV shows, more than a dozen bestselling cookbooks, and it all started with a market in the Hamptons called the Barefoot Contessa. It was 1978. Garten was a discontented federal government employee sitting at her desk when she came across an ad in the newspaper. The other day, Ina Garten told me she hadn't seen or thought of that ad in years until the co-writer of her new memoir, "Be Ready When The Luck Happens," dug it out of the archives.
INA GARTEN: And when we saw the ad - it's a really stupid, little ad. And what appealed to me about this ad is incredible. I mean, first of all, it was like - it was a shop in the Hamptons spelled S-H-O-P-P-E, which...
SHAPIRO: So pretentious.
GARTEN: ...Nobody would answer that ad.
(LAUGHTER)
SHAPIRO: The phrase that stands out to me in the ad is unlimited potential.
GARTEN: Yeah (laughter). That wasn't true, either (laughter).
SHAPIRO: And yet it was uncannily accurate.
GARTEN: It was, actually. You're right. I hadn't thought about that, but you're right.
SHAPIRO: Garten didn't grow up in a family that valued great food or entertaining. In the 1950s, her mother ran a traditional home, where food was strictly fuel.
GARTEN: My mother thought food was for nourishment. My mother really didn't connect with people. So I think that she did what she thought a mother should do but didn't really understand what it was about. And so she got food on the table, but it was broiled chicken and canned peas, and it was devoid of any flavor. And it was also devoid of any pleasure. There were no carbohydrates. There was no fat. There was nothing that would give anybody any sense of well-being.
SHAPIRO: So you didn't get your love of food from your parents, but there was one detail from your family history that stood out to me, which is that your grandfather, who immigrated from Russia, opened a candy store.
GARTEN: Isn't that extraordinary?
SHAPIRO: Do you think you inherited something from him?
GARTEN: I think I inherited something more from my grandmother, who loved to cook.
SHAPIRO: Huh.
GARTEN: And many years later, when my grandfather had a business, which we euphemistically called scrap metal, but it was really basically a junkyard where they separated parts of cars, every - all the employees knew that they could come next door, where my grandparents lived, and just help themselves to anything in the refrigerator. And my grandmother was always cooking.
SHAPIRO: So where do you think you got your love of cooking from?
GARTEN: I think it's kind of a - I don't - I can't tell you. It's either in my DNA, or it's - I was so desperate for flavor when I - and joy when I was a kid...
SHAPIRO: (Laughter).
GARTEN: ...That I always wanted to cook. And I think food was never given as in the way I feel it. It's something you do for somebody you love, and it's a way to take care of them. It was just missing from my childhood.
SHAPIRO: One thing that stood out to me as I read this book was that, while people think of you as a great cook and entertainer, you also had to figure out pricing spreadsheets and how to manage a staff and figure out a supply chain. And eventually, you became your own art director for all of your cookbooks, all while churning out a thousand baguettes a day.
GARTEN: (Laughter).
SHAPIRO: So how have you handled the learning curve of taking on all the new tasks that have been thrown at you your whole life?
GARTEN: You know, I think I seek them out. I think I'm not happy if I don't have a challenge that I think I can't meet. So when I was in the specialty food store with no experience at all, I asked Diana Stratta, who sold me the store, to stay with me for a month to teach me what I needed to know, thinking, of course, you could learn it in a month. She taught me a lot of things that were really important, but I had to figure the rest out. And I really liked that process. I liked taking something really complicated and sorting out how to do it.
When I sold the store, I thought, well, maybe my career is behind me. Maybe the best thing I've ever done will have been Barefoot Contessa. And then, when I started writing cookbooks, I realized all of those years I spent running a specialty food store and selling people things that they liked to eat at home - roast chicken, roast carrots - simple food - coconut cupcakes - that informed my experience writing a cookbook because I was writing a cookbook for people who were cooking at home. And then when I was doing it on TV, I'd written cookbooks, so I knew how to do it step by step, and I felt confident.
SHAPIRO: I don't know why this detail stands out to me, but there was a night that you slept on the shelf of your shop...
GARTEN: (Laughter).
SHAPIRO: ...Because you were just working all hours of all day and night.
GARTEN: I was too tired to go home (laughter).
SHAPIRO: So it really doesn't come easy. I mean, it really does cost a great sacrifice.
GARTEN: I think that it's really important to know that you need to do the work - that you can't learn it from somebody else. You have to learn it by your own experience. I mean, it's like - I always say this. Anybody can fly an airplane. It's what you do when something goes wrong - that's when you really learn how to fly your plane.
SHAPIRO: Since you brought it up, you have a pilot's license, too.
GARTEN: Yeah. But luckily for people in the air, I don't use it.
(LAUGHTER)
SHAPIRO: Still. When you were a kid, your father would always ask what you accomplished each day. And one of the revelations that you have reached as an adult is that doing what you love can be an accomplishment. And so when people ask you how to turn doing what they love into their life's work, what do you tell them?
GARTEN: Figure it out. There's always a way to figure out how to do what you love doing. You love traveling? Go into the travel business. When I had my store, I had a customer whose specialty was helping people figure out what their career should be. And I said to her, what do you ask them? I mean, what do you need to know in order to help people? And she said, I asked them what they used to do when they were 10 'cause that's what you would do when you were just doing things for fun.
SHAPIRO: Huh.
GARTEN: You were doing what you felt like doing. Not like you should be a lawyer or you should be a doctor. You could just do whatever you wanted to do. You were putting on plays with your friends? Maybe you should be in theater.
SHAPIRO: These days, if I say something is in the style of Ina Garten, everyone knows what that means. Like, welcoming...
GARTEN: Do they?
SHAPIRO: ...Fresh - oh, absolutely - abundant, indulgent, without being fussy or over the top. There is an Ina Garten style.
GARTEN: Thank you.
SHAPIRO: It is comfort food with an upgrade.
GARTEN: Wow.
SHAPIRO: How did you figure out what that style - I'm surprised that you're surprised to hear that. I would think that that's, like, deeply baked into your DNA.
GARTEN: Well, I love that description of what I love to do. You know, I always think it's easy to make something simple. It's hard to make something simple and really interesting. So I've, over the years, kind of embraced where those two things intersect. But then I'm always looking for - what can I do? What simple thing can I do to make this taste better? I remember I was making a lentil soup with my assistant, and I said to her, taste it. And she tasted it. And then I thought, there's just something missing. And she said, it's delicious. It doesn't need anything.
And I said to her, you know, I just - and I went to the refrigerator, and I took out a bottle of red wine vinegar. And maybe I put a tablespoon in this huge pot of lentil soup. And I said, now taste it. And it's - I've learned over the years that it's the thing that has - gives something an edge. And vinegar or lemon juice or parmesan - something like that really kind of wakes up all the flavors in a dish. And so that's what I'm always looking for. And it doesn't have to be a complicated thing or an expensive thing. It can be something that's already in your refrigerator.
SHAPIRO: Well, Ina Garten, it has been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for spending the time with us.
GARTEN: Thank you so much, Ari. It was great to talk to you.
SHAPIRO: Her new memoir is called "Be Ready When The Luck Happens."
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
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"Ina Garten of 'Barefoot Contessa' reflects on life and career in new memoir." All Things Considered, 1 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810820864/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fa15cf30. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Go-to Dinners: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook
Ina Garten. Clarkson Potter, $35 (256p) ISBN 978-1-9848-2278-9
Coming out of the pandemic with a renewed appreciation for dishes that can be frozen and prepped in advance as well as simply assembled, cookbook doyenne Garten (Modern Comfort Food) serves up a delicious, no-nonsense collection of weeknight recipes that are "simple to follow and work every time." Those features-plus a "rethink" about leftovers (she never liked them) and what constitutes a worthy meal--are amply celebrated throughout. Boards composed of store-bought and homemade items--such as bal-samic-roasted baby peppers with Italian cheeses, cured meats, and breadsticks, and a dessert board with small tarts, fresh and dried fruit, chocolate bark, and slices of pound cake--are her new go-to, she writes, because "cooking fatigue is a real thing, even for me." For a fresh and flavorful twist, the author applies cacio e pepe treatment to scrambled eggs and roasted asparagus, while hot dogs are wrapped in mustard-swiped puff pastry. Garten also draws on the wisdom of other accomplished cooks with such dishes as a potato salad a la Julia Child; a one-pot chicken with orzo from Nigella Lawson; and molasses baked beans and dark chocolate tart from Erin French of the Lost Kitchen in Maine. Practical and practically faultless, this is a real treat. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 PWxyz, LLC
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"Go-to Dinners: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook." Publishers Weekly, vol. 269, no. 30, 18 July 2022, p. 178. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A711581418/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=646f0dd0. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Since 2002, Ina Garten has filmed hundreds of hours of Food Network's Barefoot Contessa franchise, but she's mostly shared the screen with perfectly roasted chickens, photo-worthy lemon bars and, on occasion, her adoring husband, Jeffrey.
But the author of 12 cookbooks--13, come October, with the arrival of Co-To Dinners--has never filmed much with others. That changed March 26 with the Discovery+ premiere of Be My Guest With Ina Garten, an interview series that finds the Hamptons' most famous host sharing meals and conversations with the likes of Julianna Margulies, Willie Geist and director Rob Marshall. A onetime White House budget analyst whose new series has already been picked up for two more seasons, Garten recently Zoomed in from the East Coast to talk about her latest gig as culinary interviewer.
How do you approach booking guests for the new show?
They're people that I admire, who've done really interesting things. It's often assumed that successful people got where they are because of talent or luck. But I think it's because they powered through something. So I'm always interested in what barriers people hit.
What was your barrier?
When I was working in the government, I just wanted to get out. I wanted something that was mine. So I chose a specialty food store in the middle of nowhere. When I decided to do cookbooks, the popular thing at the time was these enormous books of 250 recipes --how to cook everything. I wanted a book of 75 great recipes, like one really good roast chicken. My publisher didn't get it. People were skeptical because it was so different from what was being done. I kept my vision, and, fortunately, they stuck with me.
Between the shows, the books and 3.7 million Instagram followers, how has your audience changed over the years?
Everybody loves cooking. I always reference a time I was walking up Madison Avenue and a woman in a big fur coat was like, "Oh, darling, love your cookbooks." One block later, a truck driver pulled over and said, "Hey, babe, love your show!" That's what cooking is.
You're a known Francophile. Have you and your husband been able to return to Paris during the pandemic?
I haven't been since December 2019.1 haven't even been to an airport. I haven't gone anywhere.
At least there are worse places to be stuck than the Hamptons.
Yes, and it's gorgeous today. I love East Hampton in the winter, when there's nobody here. Of course, I'm very grateful that [weekenders and tourists] come--and then I'm really glad when they go home.
Interview edited for length and clarity.
Caption: Ina Garten (left) and Julianna Margulies on an episode of Be My Guest With Ina Garten. Below: Garten's forthcoming cookbook.
Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.
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O'Connell, Mikey. "Ina Garten Moves From Cooking Into Chatting: The Barefoot Contessa, star of a new Discovery+ interview series, on her life's biggest barrier, why her publisher didn't 'get' her first book and the universal allure of cooking." Hollywood Reporter, vol. 428, no. 11, 30 Mar. 2022, p. 28. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A700265066/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=c9406b1b. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Modern Comfort Food
Ina Garten. Clarkson Potter, $35 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8041-8706-0
Garten (Cook Like a Pro) admits in her delightful 12th outing that she's been "a little grumpier" than usual during the pandemic and has been reaching for foods that soothe. Fittingly, she here offers simple spins on classic comfort fare: roasted shishito peppers with hollandaise is a new take on eggs Benedict, and chicken soup made with frozen peas and onions is a riff on chicken pot pie, the crust of which is frozen puff pastry punched out with a cookie cutter and baked into large croutons. Garten has a way with irresistible snacks, and a chapter on cocktails and foods for entertaining a crowd includes nachos topped with fresh crabmeat and a cream cheese and mayonnaise mixture. She also doesn't shrink from fat: a free-form tomato and goat cheese pie that serves four for lunch uses one and a half sticks of butter, as well as a macaroni and cheese with mushrooms and truffle butter. To balance that out, there's a salad comprising a bright mix of fresh peas, sugar snap peas, mint, and manchego cheese. A chapter of breakfast options includes a puffy apple Dutch baby and hash browns crisped in a waffle iron. Specific brands are frequently recommended, such as the Nabisco ginger snaps in a banana rum trifle, and Pepperidge Farm top-split buns for tuna and avocado rolls. Garten fans will dig into these inviting recipes, presented in her always friendly tone. (Oct.)
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"Modern Comfort Food." Publishers Weekly, vol. 267, no. 29, 20 July 2020, p. 175. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A632367695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=0b736ad7. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Cook Like a Pro: Recipes and Tips for Home Cooks
Ina Garten. Clarkson Potter, $35 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8041-8704-6
Food Network host Garten's disappointing 11th cookbook revolves around the author's professional tips intended to elevate home cooking, but much of her advice will come as no surprise. She begins by touching on basics, such as proper seasoning ("You've been undersalting") and plating ("Plating food is like arranging flowers in a vase") that are helpful yet too familiar. A tomato and avocado salad incorporates arugula, lemon juice, and red onion, and the helpful hints include instructions to use a serrated knife to cut the tomatoes. A sidebar on baking (deemed "very scientific") cautions that an oven takes 20 minutes to preheat. A recipe for turkey sandwiches made with store-bought mayonnaise suggests toasting the bread in the oven, but doesn't explain why that's preferable to using a toaster. Many dishes are inspired by other recipes: the fried chicken sandwich from Shake Shack, and Charlie Bird's farro salad with shaved parmesan (use a vegetable peeler, Garten advises), which is based on a recipe written by Melissa Clark in the New York Times. As a result, Garten's own style doesn't shine through. Her recipes are all perfectly sound, but the lack of a strong point of view or game-changing advice makes this one of her lesser collections. (Oct.)
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"Cook Like a Pro: Recipes and Tips for Home Cooks." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 32, 6 Aug. 2018, pp. 65+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A550547704/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f7131710. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Cook Like a Pro: Recipes and Tips for Home Cooks
Ina Garten. Clarkson Potter, $35 (272p) ISBN 978-0-8041-8704-6
Food Network host Garten's disappointing 11th cookbook revolves around the author's professional tips intended to elevate home cooking, but much of her advice will come as no surprise. She begins by touching on basics, such as proper seasoning ("You've been undersalting") and plating ("Plating food is like arranging flowers in a vase") that are helpful yet too familiar. A tomato and avocado salad incorporates arugula, lemon juice, and red onion, and the helpful hints include instructions to use a serrated knife to cut the tomatoes. A sidebar on baking (deemed "very scientific") cautions that an oven takes 20 minutes to preheat. A recipe for turkey sandwiches made with store-bought mayonnaise suggests toasting the bread in the oven, but doesn't explain why that's preferable to using a toaster. Many dishes are inspired by other recipes: the fried chicken sandwich from Shake Shack, and Charlie Bird's farro salad with shaved parmesan (use a vegetable peeler, Garten advises), which is based on a recipe written by Melissa Clark in the New York Times. As a result, Garten's own style doesn't shine through. Her recipes are all perfectly sound, but the lack of a strong point of view or game-changing advice makes this one of her lesser collections. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Source Citation
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Cook Like a Pro: Recipes and Tips for Home Cooks." Publishers Weekly, vol. 265, no. 32, 6 Aug. 2018, pp. 65+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A550547704/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=f7131710. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Cooking for Jeffrey: A Barefoot Confessa Cookbook
Ina Garten. Clarkson Potter, $35 (256p) ISBN 978-0-307-46489-7
Even casual fans of Garten (The Barefoot Contesta Parties, Barefoot Confessa at Home, etc.) are familiar with Jeffrey, her beloved husband of over 40 years, who accompanies her on many of her trips near and far in search of culinary inspiration. In her 10th book, she revisits many of those locales in this valentine to her husband. Following the format of her previous books--it all starts with a cocktail--she offers readers simple, tasty recipes that are well suited for entertaining guests, as well as simple dinners for two that can be prepped or even prepared ahead of time. Simple party fare--herbed goat cheese, camembert and prosciutto tartines, a flavor-packed lentil and kielbasa salad--comes together quickly, and can't-miss mains--cider-roasted pork tenderloins with roasted plum chutney, a poached lobster with tarragon butter--are foolproof. Some dishes, such as roast chicken, meatballs, and roasted potatoes with herbs, will look familiar to devoted followers. Garten's enthusiasm and thoughtful preparations are hard to resist, and she's a gregarious and generous hostess, quick to credit those who shared or inspired her recipes for the book. She's even more likable here as she shares the story of her and Jeffrey 's courtship and marriage, as well as the early days of her namesake restaurant. True to form, this culinary love letter is as warm and comforting as Garten's dishes. (Oct.)
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"Cooking for Jeffrey: A Barefoot Confessa Cookbook." Publishers Weekly, vol. 263, no. 31, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 62. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A460285731/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fd28c535. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Make It Ahead: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook
Ina Garten, photos by Quentin Bacon and John M. Hall. Clarkson Potter, $35 (272p)
ISBN 978-0-307-46488-0
Garten offers smart solutions with over 75 recipes for make-in-advance dishes. Recipes are suited for both family weeknight fare meal planning and for special occasions. There are cocktails, from margaritas to martinis, and plenty of platters and soups for starters, including a wild mushroom and farro soup and walnut roquefort-topped warm fig and arugula salad. For lunch, ham and leek empanadas can be filled, wrapped, and kept up to three days in the fridge and three months in the freezer before baking. Garten provides lots of casseroles, hearty grain and vegetable sides, and desserts. She also guides cooks through a complete make-ahead Thanksgiving feast. Recipe sidebars show make-ahead information for packing and storage and the number of days ahead the dish can be prepared before cooking or serving. Recipes are designed both as dishes for immediate consumption or make-ahead meals. Garten provides 10 make-ahead tips for parties, and there are essays on baking, presentation, and proper freezing methods, along with sample make-ahead menus for entertaining. A secret kitchen sidekick, the Barefoot Contessa quells the last-minute fears of those who entertain. (Oct.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 PWxyz, LLC
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"Make It Ahead: A Barefoot Contessa Cookbook." Publishers Weekly, vol. 261, no. 37, 15 Sept. 2014, p. 53. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A382805439/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=403a4cc5. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.
Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust
Ina Garten. Clarkson Potter, $35 (272p) ISBN 978-0-307-46487-3
A master caterer, TV celebrity, and prolific cookbook author, Garten will delight her legion of fans with this appetizing and welcoming cookbook. Garten focuses on foolproof cooking: recipes that work, are satisfying to eat, and can be made ahead of time. For those who struggle with timing the doneness of multiple dishes, she advises creating a very specific game plan that lists every step, and provides l0 tips to aid in reducing stress and ensuring a well-timed, delicious meal. Recipes cover cocktails and starters, lunch and dinner, and vegetables and desserts. Photos are luscious and mouth-watering, and will drive readers into the kitchen. In addition, she shares her expertise on numerous related topics such as menus, shopping, and table settings, an often-overlooked aspect of entertaining. Recipes are fairly simple but pack big flavor, such as mussels with saffron mayo, balsamic roasted beet salad, penne alia vecchia bettola (penne with vodka), and foolproof ribs with barbecue sauce. Combinations are sometimes unusual bur still appeal, like roasted sausages and grapes, and salmon and melting cherry tomatoes. Garten doesn't skimp on desserts, an area where many cookbooks fall down. Her chocolate cassis cake and raspberry crumble bars are drool-inducing. Once again Garten's culinary wizardry will inspire, delight, and empower readers to entertain in true Barefoot Contessa style. (Oct.)
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"Barefoot Contessa Foolproof: Recipes You Can Trust." Publishers Weekly, vol. 259, no. 42, 15 Oct. 2012, p. 58. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A305745600/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=e8a265c8. Accessed 3 Feb. 2025.