Ina Garten’s cookbooks have always been major page-turners. I dog-ear her recipes and swoon over her relationship with her sweetie pie husband, Jeffrey, as if they’re taken from my favorite romance novel (I mean, they kind of are?).

So if that sounds anything like you, take it from me that you should get yourself to a bookstore and pick up Garten’s new memoir, Be Ready When the Luck Happens, when it hits shelves on October 1.

I stayed up late one night to gulp it down in one sitting as if it were a giant quarantine Cosmopolitan. Ina’s memoir is equal parts dishy and inspiring, chronicling her winding path toward being the Barefoot Contessa we all know and love. We also get a revealing look into the early days of her love story with Jeffrey.

While I consider myself a foremost scholar on all things Ina, there were so many surprising moments in the memoir—and not just about her job working at a strip club. Here are just a few of the most shocking ones to look out for as you tear through Garten’s memoir:

1. When she bought her first business, Barefoot Contessa, Ina had never worked a single day in the food industry.
Outside of selling Dunkin’ Donuts to students in her dorm room in college, Ina had never worked in food. She was actually writing policies on nuclear energy at the White House when she initially spotted the ad for the retail space in the Hamptons. But owning a food store was quite literally in her blood: Her grandfather opened his own candy store when he first arrived in the U.S. after immigrating from Russia.

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2. In fact, the kitchen was off limits to Ina when she was growing up.

Ina’s childhood was less than ideal, with two parents who cycled through periods of neglect and abuse, leading to her own mother keeping the kitchen off limits to Garten. Meals at the house were also very much not anything close to finding in a Garten cookbook, featuring more steamed broccoli and broiled chicken rather than panko-crusted racks of lamb.

3. Ina actually tried to do something illegal on her first date with Jeffrey.
Ina certainly lets loose more often than her ironed linen shirts will have you believe, especially on her first date with Jeffrey. An underage Ina planned a date wherein they crossed over to New York State (where the drinking age was 18) to go to a bar. Well, Ina didn’t bring an ID (fake or otherwise), so a coffee date it was. It apparently made Jeffrey fall for her even harder, and the rest is history.

4. But everyone’s favorite couple almost didn’t make it.
A few times, actually! Ina’s mother tried on more than one occasion to meddle in her romantic dalliances, and that included the early days of dating Jeffrey. On top of that, Garten seriously considered divorcing Jeffrey in the early days of the Barefoot Contessa store, when there was a clear imbalance between Ina’s desire to push back on the traditional roles of marriage (including the duties a wife was expected to do). After a brief separation, the couple reconciled, and my faith in love was restored.

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5. To this day, the couple still don’t wear their wedding rings.
Apparently they took them off a few years after their wedding in 1968, and never put them back on again.

6. Martha Stewart and Ina Garten had a hidden connection years before they ever became friends.
During what Ina calls her father’s “midlife crisis,” he fell in love with a house in Stamford, CT, and bought it when the price was fortuitously cut in half. This same house was designed by a group of architects who only built two houses: the house Garten’s father bought and the lead architect’s own home, which was later owned by none other than Martha Stewart.

7. Ina Garten was a slightly unlikely feminist icon, even back in the ’60s.
Even though Ina wanted (ironically) to go back to the kitchen during a time when women wanted to flee it, she still pushed boundaries on what women were allowed to do in the ’60s and ’70s. In one such case, she pushed back on a bank’s refusal to initially approve their mortgage, assuming Ina would quit her job to inevitably have a baby (and her income didn’t “count”). To further convince you of Ina’s status as a certified badass, she also got her pilot’s license, which was exceedingly difficult because flight instructors initially refused to teach her. She refused to budge until they found someone who would allow her to take lessons, full stop.

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    Mackenzie Filson is a food writer and contributing digital food producer at Delish. Her favorite ice cream flavor is chocolate-pine and if wine was an astrological sign she’d be a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. She’s never met a bag of Spicy Sweet Chili Doritos she didn’t eat in one sitting.


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