#TuesdayTopic: Inspiring Women Featuring Ina Garten
Reprinted from an IG post
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Happy Tuesday! We are midway through Women’s History Month, and we’re trying something new here to keep the spirit of honoring women alive all throughout the year! Welcome to our #tuesdaystopic, where the topic every Tuesday will be inspiring women, past and present, some famous, some not, who have embraced midlife and reinvented, reimagined or otherwise achieved great things in the second half! I have always considered myself a late bloomer, and love to learn about others who hit their stride later in life.
Today we’re featuring Ina Garten, celebrity chef and author of 12 wildly popular bestselling cookbooks (the only ones I wouldn’t part with when downsizing from my suburban home to my NYC apartment!). I was fascinated to learn that Ina did not publish her first cookbook until she was 51 years old, which I found out when my sister-in-law sent me an encouraging note about starting this blog at that very same age! Ina went on to debut her cooking show, The Barefoot Contessa, at age 54 (after much courting from the Food Network). Interestingly, she never attended cooking school nor did she ever work in a restaurant. In fact, she worked as Nuclear Analyst for the Office of Management and Budget, where she spent her days analyzing important government policy. While she didn’t grow up cooking, after a 4-month trip to France with her husband Jeffrey where she lived on $5/day, she returned home and began to cook her way through Julia Child’s “The Art of French Cooking,” teaching herself as she went along. She fell in love with food and cooking, and loved to throw parties and entertain while living and working in Washington.
In 1978, she decided to take a major leap, leave her job and purchase a speciality food store in the West Hampton, a town she had never even visited before! She found the shop through an ad in the New York Times, kept its name Barefoot Contessa (after the 1954 Humphrey Bogart Ava Gardner movie), and with no food business experience, turned her love of cooking into a thriving business. She learned much from the previous owner, Diana Stratta, in a beautiful #womenhelpingwomen way, and has said that she owes her everything. She eventually took larger space in East Hampton, and ran the business for 18 years before she sold it and started writing, launching a whole new midlife venture and industry unto itself. The rest, as they say, is history!
I often think of Ina when I start to feel discouraged. She had never formally written prior to having that first book published in 1999 at the age of 51. And she was really just getting started! Eleven books have followed, and they are some of the best cookbooks out there in my humble opinion (her recipes are absolutely foolproof!). Through her books and TV shows, she has taught America to cook and carved out a brilliant 2nd/3rd career that really began for her in midlife. She’s just such an awesome example of the possibility of reinvention and the great potential in a woman’s second act!
I hope these women’s stories will uplift you and inspire you to find ways to embrace the next chapter with an open mind and heart and with the courage to pursue your dreams( both deferred and new)! Above all, I hope the experiences of these incredible women drive home the message that it’s never too late to become who you were meant to be…