After a painful childhood, Ina Garten followed a recipe for life, joy and marriage

Ina Garten’s first foray into television was a disaster.Martha Stewart’s TV production company approached the beloved culinary personality to host a show following the success of  “The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.” The book, published in 1999, was a surprise best-seller, selling more than 100,000 copies in its first year.Garten recalls in her memoir, “Be Ready When The Luck Happens,” that two giant trucks arrived to her home in the Hamptons to set up filming, forcing her and her husband, Jeffrey to live in two bedrooms upstairs for the eight weeks of the shoot. Everyday a producer would hand Ina a script and everyday Ina would toss it.“Their way of doing things sometimes mystified me,” she writes.

“They’d shoot every step of a recipe but then forget to film the ‘beauty shot,’ the mouth-watering image of the finished dish so people could see how delicious it was.”Garten remembers that she spent her time telling the director, “No, that’s the way Martha does it! You already have Martha.You want me to do it the way I do it, which is simpler and more casual.” She writes that “the atmosphere was tense .

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those eight weeks were the most difficult and exhausting work I’ve ever done.”The final straw was when the septic system overloaded due to 50 people using the same toilet and “sewage started bubbling up in the middle of my lawn.A cesspool truck rushed over to take care of the problem, but the grass was muddy with — never mind! — and the truck’s wheels got stuck in the muck.”The director was so distressed by the chaotic scene that she “wrapped herself up in a pashmina shawl, went out in the back garden, and threw up.” Garner was so disgusted by the shoot that she vowed to never film a television series again.Thankfully, a TV exec named Eileen Opatut wouldn’t take no for an answer and understood that the charm of Ina was to let her be herself.“Barefoot Contessa” debuted on The Food Network in 2002 and garnered...