Want to start out the New Year with a great read? If you are an Ina Garten fan, as we are, her new memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens and this episode are for you! And with the audio version, it’s like Ina is keeping you company while you’re knitting—as Ina would say, “How great is that?”

We decided that Ina is a bit like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. How can that possibly be, you ask? To be clear, she does not compare herself to a Phoenix. But as she describes growing up in a strict, 1950s household obsessed with appearances where her mother (a dietician) saw food as sustenance and insisted her daughter focus only on her studies, Ina rises from the ashes to create a food empire grounded on the opposite of those values. Ina’s food is about love, something she learned when she started making cookies for her then boyfriend, Jeffrey: “baking something delicious was a way to express my feelings and to connect with Jeffrey—I’d think of him while I cooked, and when he reached for one of my cookies or brownies, I knew he’d think of me” (35). Grandma always said the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

What Ina wanted—and still wants—is to be “independent and self-determined,” and if that meant leaving her job in the White House to own a specialty food shoppe, then that’s the point: she wanted the freedom to make that decision, even when everyone else, including her parents, thought it was wrong. And guess what? Ina was right. The irony is that she worked incredibly hard to make cooking easy for the rest of us.

“You weren’t lucky. You make your own luck.”

Oprah Winfrey to Ina Garten (303)

There’s only one thing we must take issue with, and we are going to side with Oprah Winfrey here, who smacked Ina on the arm when she returned to her seat after accepting an award and expressing gratitude for all of her good luck. Ina made her own luck. Oprah wins that one.

A Phoenix is also the theme for Bootie’s latest knitting project for our sister Melissa, who decided she needed a pussy hat emblazoned with a Phoenix rising from the ashes of 2024. As all good things, it was a collaborative effort, with Liss designing the Phoenix, Bootie’s son providing the graphing paper for a knitting-stitch scale, and Bootie knitting and embellishing with duplicate stitches. A lot of work, but it looks great!

So make a big batch of Ina’s delicious carrot ginger soup—very healthy, depending on how much cream you add—and snuggle in for a listen to Ina reading Be Ready When the Luck Happens and to our podcast!

P.S. Did we mention that Ina is also a knitter?!

Show notes at www.bootieandbossy.com

Shear delight is the only way to describe our conversation with the wonderfully talented Christina Kading, who began her career as a second-generation sheep-shearer at the age of 8 ("I was born on top of a sheep!"). What's so hard about sheep shearing, you ask? First there are the kicking animals who don't necessarily want a woolcut, even though they have it growing out of their ears and eyeballs. Then there's the sheer physicality it demands, second only to jackhammering. And finally there's all the sexism, the men like Gary in Pennsylvania who didn't think Christina--a woman!--could shear his alpacas. Step aside, Gary, and let Christina Kading show you just how capable she is. She can do so much more than shear Gary's alpacas, though that alone would be enough--she's an accomplished artist, working in wood and wool, and a mixologist to boot. Try out Christina's recipes for a Jade Gimlet and an Espresso Martini--they are divine concoctions to warm up and refresh on a cold winter night (or day).

"Just because we are women, and we are gay, doesn't mean we are not capable of shearing an alpaca."

Christina Kading

We met Christina at Rhinebeck where she was selling her rugs, hand-made from the unwanted wool from her shearing. Her designs are wonderfully geometric and coincide with the wood tabletops she makes using pyrography, a technique of inscribing designs with fire. Her fascination with lines and shapes began in her high school math classes (as a way to avoid learning math), but that has blossomed into beautiful art informed by sacred geometry, the sense that we are all connected through universally shared lines, shapes and patterns.

We hope you enjoy our conversation with Christina as much as we did--we learned a lot, and it is true that "sheep-shearers are just irresistible. . . we just hypnotize people with our loving, gentle, sheep-shearing skills. I don't know what it is, but it gets them every time." So grab a Jade Gimlet or Espresso Martini and take a break from the holiday chaos to tune in for a great conversation with a fascinating artist and sheep-shearer!

Check out the Show Notes at www.bootieandbossy.com

We're back--we hope you missed us! And we brought scissors, and we are not afraid to use them in spatchcocking a turkey for Thanksgiving. "Spatchcocking?" You may well ask. It's not just a word for removing the spine of the turkey to make for a wonderfully evenly roasted bird in half the time--say goodbye to over-cooked, dry breasts and under-cooked thighs (the turkey's, that is). But it's more than that as chef, teacher and cookbook author Kim O'Donnel explains in "Spatchocking: A Culinary Term for Our Times." Written in 2022 after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, but perhaps even more resonant today, O'Donnel reflects on her own freedom to make choices that have shaped who she is.

"The right to decide allowed me to become the woman I am . . . The choices that were mine to make allowed me to forge my own path. They've given me the wisdom to know this: Without safe, legal abortion, this country is spatchcocked."

Kim O'Donnel, "Spatchcock: A Culinary Term for Our Times," Lulu Pork Chop, July 3, 2022

But what about Rhinebeck?! While other podcasters might broadcast live from the New York State Sheep and Wool Festival, we prefer to wallow in the womb of time and reflect on our experience for a month. What did we conclude? It wasn't just fun, it was joyously inspiring. We met so many designers and knitters we admire--Aimée Gille, Vincent Williams, Patty Lyons, Sarah Schira, Jamie Lomax, Bristol Ivy, Gigi Queen of Orange, the Grocery Girls and Rosann Fleischauer. What about Andrea Mowry? Don't worry, her pattern "Framed" clearly caught the collective fancy this year and was everywhere in all colors and sizes. It was magical to see so many people wearing hand-knit their framed garb on the hill for the meet-up.

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