Ina Garten gets candid on separation from husband Jeffrey: He ‘expected a wife that would make dinner’
nypost.comIna Garten needed to add certain ingredients into the mix to make her marriage work. The Food Network star, 76, who has been married to her husband Jeffrey Garten for 56 years, detailed their one-time separation and near-divorce in the ’70s in her upcoming memoir “Be Ready When the Luck Happens,” per People Tuesday.Ina was working overtime running the specialty food store that would later shoot her into stardom, the Barefoot Contessa, but Jeffrey, 77, “expected a wife that would make dinner,” she wrote in an excerpt.“There were certain roles that we played, and I found them really annoying,” the Food Network host continued. “I felt that if I just hit the pause button, I would get his attention.”Ina decided to quit her job in the White House, where she and Jeffrey both worked, to run the Barefoot Contessa full-time.
Jeffrey stayed behind in Washington, DC, and visited the Hamptons on weekends.Ina acknowledged how the dynamic shifted after that.“When I bought Barefoot Contessa, I shattered our traditional roles — took a baseball bat to them and left them in pieces,” the cook writes in her memoir (out Oct.
1). “While I was still cooking, cleaning, shopping, managing at the store, I was doing it as a businesswoman, not a wife. My responsibilities made it impossible for me to even think about anything else.
There was no expectation about who got home from work first and what they should do, because I never got home from work!”And despite Jeffrey making an effort to visit on weekends, Ina felt it pertinent to figure out what she needed on her own.“When Jeffrey came on weekends, he was a distraction,” she continued. “I didn’t pay enough attention to him.
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