NEW YORK (AP) — Long before Ina Garten's Barefoot Contessa mini-empire of bestselling cookbooks and TV shows ever took off, she found herself at an airport, wanting to learn to fly. It was the late 1960s and she was a newlywed in Fayetteville, North Carolina. She and her soldier-husband, Jeffrey, would often pass a small private airport and Garten was intrigued.
She marched into the terminal to find out about taking flying lessons. “I’m really sorry,” the guy at the desk told her, “but we don’t have anybody who’ll teach a girl how to fly.” Do you think that stopped Ina Garten? The story of how she refused to budge until she got lessons in a cockpit is included in her new memoir, "Be Ready When the Luck Happens," which distills stories from her life into lessons for foodies and non-foodies, alike.
“I wanted it to be fun to read because otherwise nobody would read this,” she tells The Associated Press. “I wanted it to be stories from my life, but I also wanted each story to have a point — in the way you could take a recipe away and make a chocolate cake, I want you to take the idea away and be able to use it in your life.” Revisiting key moments and her marriage The memoir — written with help from writer Deborah Davis — is packed with stories of Garten pushing for her vision, not least when in 1978 she spotted an ad in The New York Times and on a whim bought a little specialty food store in the Hamptons called Barefoot Contessa.
At the time, she wa.