Ina Garten’s Hairdo

My name in Carter’s phone is Ina Garten. We look somewhat alike and we both love to cook and teach people things. So when Carter told me she was listening to Ina’s memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens and suggested I should listen to it, so I did.

Outside of our hairdo and coloring I never thought I was much like Ina. I have admired her for a long time, but she is a more soft spoken person than I could ever be.

I started listening to her book, read by her, which is comforting. Her back ground could not be more different from mine, even though we grew up fairly near each other. She came from a Jewish family (which I might have come from in another life.) in Brooklyn, who eventually moved to Stamford, CT. Her parents were abusive, even though her surgeon Father appeared respectable. They had no confidence in Ina and belittled her quite a lot. I had a father who did the opposite, always telling me I could do anything and that I was better than I actually was.

The one similarity is our mothers both did not believe in feeding the children and never once had a carb in the house. Maybe that is why we both became cooks.

Ina’s more scientific about her cooking. She would test and retest recipes over and over. She said she never served something for a dinner party she did not pre-test first. I am quite the opposite. I never test anything in advance and can almost never recreate something exactly as I had made it before because I cook by the seat of my pants. That is also the way I ran my catering business.

I remember one customer calling me wanting me to cook beef ribs like they did in Texas. I had never even eaten beef ribs, let alone cook them. This was before the internet so I had to find a recipe or wing it. I winged it. The customer loved them. To me they seemed like something out of the Flintstones, giant bones too big for a plate.

One similarity is Ina likes a challenge to keep her creative juices flowing. I am the same way, but where we differ is I feel like I can do anything that I really want to do, even if I have never done it before and have no experience doing it. My attitude has always been, if I can pay a person to do something for me then I can probably learn to do it myself. This is especially true when it comes to making things.

Listening to Ina’s book has been delightful. She is an incredibly hard worker and has a lot of great insights about running her businesses, which are very successful. But outside of our hairdos, and the fact that we both were in the food business, I find I am not like her at all. I really like her, but she is just much nicer than I ever will be and just not quite as irreverent or funny.