Ina Garten on her memoir, and a life of reinvention [Video]

Even making a cocktail with Ina Garten takes precision, but boy, is it worth it. “The key to this is that it’s fresh juice,” she said. “So many times you go to a bar or restaurant and they make whiskey sours with, like, bottled lemon juice. That’s just the worst!

RECIPE: Ina Garten’s Fresh Whiskey Sours

The kitchen in her studio in East Hampton, New York, is familiar to millions of viewers of her Emmy Award-winning cooking shows on the Food Network. But she doesn’t like to call herself a chef. “Well, I’m not,” she said. “I’m not a trained chef.”

In fact, as she writes in her new memoir, “Be Ready When the Luck Happens”(to be published October 1), back in the 1970s she and her husband Jeffrey were both working in economic policy jobs at the White House. But …