Episode 37: How is Ina Garten like a Phoenix?

Want to start out the New Year with a great read? If you are an Ina Garten fan, as we are, her new memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens and this episode are for you! And with the audio version, it’s like Ina is keeping you company while you’re knitting—as Ina would say, “How great is that?”

We decided that Ina is a bit like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. How can that possibly be, you ask? To be clear, she does not compare herself to a Phoenix. But as she describes growing up in a strict, 1950s household obsessed with appearances where her mother (a dietician) saw food as sustenance and insisted her daughter focus only on her studies, Ina rises from the ashes to create a food empire grounded on the opposite of those values. Ina’s food is about love, something she learned when she started making cookies for her then boyfriend, Jeffrey: “baking something delicious was a way to express my feelings and to connect with Jeffrey—I’d think of him while I cooked, and when he reached for one of my cookies or brownies, I knew he’d think of me” (35). Grandma always said the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

What Ina wanted—and still wants—is to be “independent and self-determined,” and if that meant leaving her job in the White House to own a specialty food shoppe, then that’s the point: she wanted the freedom to make that decision, even when everyone else, including her parents, thought it was wrong. And guess what? Ina was right. The irony is that she worked incredibly hard to make cooking easy for the rest of us.

“You weren’t lucky. You make your own luck.”

Oprah Winfrey to Ina Garten (303)

There’s only one thing we must take issue with, and we are going to side with Oprah Winfrey here, who smacked Ina on the arm when she returned to her seat after accepting an award and expressing gratitude for all of her good luck. Ina made her own luck. Oprah wins that one.

A Phoenix is also the theme for Bootie’s latest knitting project for our sister Melissa, who decided she needed a pussy hat emblazoned with a Phoenix rising from the ashes of 2024. As all good things, it was a collaborative effort, with Liss designing the Phoenix, Bootie’s son providing the graphing paper for a knitting-stitch scale, and Bootie knitting and embellishing with duplicate stitches. A lot of work, but it looks great!

So make a big batch of Ina’s delicious carrot ginger soup—very healthy, depending on how much cream you add—and snuggle in for a listen to Ina reading Be Ready When the Luck Happens and to our podcast!

P.S. Did we mention that Ina is also a knitter?!

Show notes at www.bootieandbossy.com