Rachael Ray can whip up tasty meals in minutes or dine out at any number of five-star restaurants.
So what does the celebrity chef really eat?
From drool-worthy pasta carbonara to more chicken than you can imagine, here are some
of the foods the culinary expert frequently fawns over.
Every self-respecting Ray fan knows she adores her Italian mama, Elsa.
In fact, Ray calls Elsa her culinary mentor — and that includes teaching Ray how to
cook and love Italian cuisine.
When asked about her go-to comfort food in a profile in her own magazine, Ray admitted,
"I guess pasta is my favorite."
Still, Ray doesn't necessarily cook the food she craves.
She told The Adrienne Gale Experience,
"I don't know that I have a favorite meal.
When I'm cooking, I'm thinking about the person I'm feeding and I want to make them whatever
they want."
Ray cooks for her husband, John Cusimano, the most.
When asked by QVC about her favorite thing to cook, Ray replied,
"Probably pasta carbonara for John.
It's his favorite.
We don't even get a chance to plate it, instead we eat it straight out of the pot.
It's that good."
Carbonara is a savory dish, but the story of the first time Ray made it for her husband
is super-sweet.
In her cookbook Cooking 'Round the Clock, she revealed,
"I knew my boyfriend was the man to marry when I asked him what he would like for his
birthday dinner.
I offered up lobster, steak, fine foods of all nationalities, to which he replied: 'Can
I just have some of your carbonara?'
Whoa!
I was right about him."
"Get in there, honey…this is a Tuesday at our house."
According to her blog, Ray has been dubbed the "Queen of Burgers."
In a Food Network profile, she described herself as a "burger-obsessed person."
At one point, she even apparently had plans to open a burger joint in midtown New York.
While that doesn't appear to have come to fruition — at least not yet — it doesn't
mean you can't get your hands on a Ray-style burger.
You'll just have to make it yourself.
In addition to the wealth of burger recipes Ray has shared on her site and her shows over
the years, the burger-lover devoted an entire cookbook to them in 2012.
Aptly titled The Book of Burger, it's bursting with over 300 recipes for burgers, sliders,
and basically, anything you can put on a bun.
She told The Adrienne Gale Experience,
"I am burger obsessed and I love playing with the idea of what a burger can be for people.
[...] What I love about the burger is it makes food accessible and fun for everyone.
I have hundreds and hundreds of [recipes] never before published in my book of my burgers,
but then I also have a bonus section of all of our award-winning chef burgers from our
burger bash."
While there are undoubtedly cooks in the world who don't use eggs because of allergies or
food lifestyle choices, Ray isn't one of them.
A quick glance at her website reveals she puts them on burgers, in ramen,
eats them at any hour — the sky's the limit.
Having said that, it isn't too shocking that Ray is a bit particular about the eggs she
eats.
In an interview with Food Network, she noted,
"[Eggs are] one of those grocery items worth paying a premium for."
According to the site, she prefers Araucana eggs, an egg produced by a South American
breed of chicken.
If Araucanas aren't available where you are, though, Ray recommends any cage-free egg from
a small farm setting.
Ray uses her Araucana eggs to whip up all kinds of dishes, but there's one particular
egg dish she can't seem to get enough of.
In March 2018, just ahead of Easter, Ray wrote a letter to her blog readers to kick off new
spring content.
In it, she admitted she's a deviled egg fanatic, saying,
"One symbol of spring grabs my attention more than all the others: the egg.
I am stuffed-egg obsessed."
Given how successful she is, Ray can probably have her pick of the most expensive, exquisite,
gourmet food around the globe.
But when it comes right down to it, the food she reaches for time and again is far more
humble: the simple tomato.
In 2013, she revealed to USA Today that the tomato is her favorite fruit, and she often
scoops them up at her local New York farmers markets — a great way to score them for
a steal, as she told the outlet.
She said,
"It's the last bargain left in food.
You can ask for seconds at any place and they will give you less-than-perfect things that
taste delicious, like tomatoes."
Fortunately for Ray, she can also pick them right out of her Adirondacks garden.
In August 2018, Ray noticed her good friend Oprah Winfrey had shared an Instagram post
about fresh fruits and veggies.
In return, Ray posted an enviable spread of vine-ripened tomatoes and sauce, writing,
"Hey [Oprah], saw your beautiful bounty from [Harvest Day].
We're rolling deep in Upstate NY!
Tomato fest from our garden — today's fresh picked."
Spend five minutes on Ray's website, and you'll walk away with more chicken recipes than you
know what to do with.
Same goes for Instagram, too — this poultry proves to be one of the bubbly cook's go-to
dishes for social media sharing.
Chicken is a classic in the kitchen, but Ray has a ton of tricks up her sleeve when it
comes to breaking out of your plain chicken wing rut.
Take her Insta feed, for example.
In January 2018, she shared a drool-worthy snapshot of "Whisky Wings."
In April 2018, she shared a recipe for Japanese chicken wings, and just a few days later,
she snapped another photo of, in her words, "[the] easy and amazing balsamic chicken legs"
she'd made for dinner.
But in July 2018, Ray took to Instagram to share the holy grail of all chicken recipes:
her "Fried, Tried, and True" chicken legs.
Thanks to her Italian heritage, Ray grew up in a household accustomed to a Mediterranean
diet.
Despite the fact that the term "Mediterranean diet" is used very generally, U.S. News & World
Report notes that there is no such thing as one version of this dietary lifestyle.
However, at its core, it's a diet described as "low in red meat, sugar, and saturated
fat and high in produce, nuts and other healthful foods."
In March 2018, Ray visited the Dr. Oz show to offer insight into the diet's must-haves.
At the top of that list?
Salad, chock-full of vibrant veggies topped with healthy acids and olive oil.
She explained,
"Beets, colorful peppers — so sweet or hot peppers — and dark greens, they're all activated
by the olive oil.
They're fat-soluble nutrients, right?
Great for brain power."
Just as interesting, though, is when Ray eats her salads.
She shared,
"After [the main course].
Always after.
It's a digestive thing, quite frankly.
But you know, we would put them out on the table at the same time, but we all eat our
salad after dinner."
"I love that she knows all this stuff.
Really Mediterranean!"
But there's one thing you'll never catch Ray eating in her salad, no matter what time of
day.
During her Rachael Ray Every Day "Like a Boss" panel in February 2019, she said,
"Oh my god, the chopped lettuce in a sack sucks!
Stop it!
I'm sorry, sue me lettuce industry.
It smells weird and it costs more."
Sardines are truly polarizing — for the most part, people either love them or hate
them.
Make no mistake, though; Ray's Mediterranean diet means she loves sardines.
During her 2018 appearance on the Dr. Oz show, she said,
"An essential in our diet — essential — is fish.
Seafood.
Sardines, my favorite sandwich in life.
Oh, I love sardines.
I put them on the grill, I roast them in the oven, pasta con le sarde is one of my favorites.
Stale bread and sardines makes me cry because it makes me think of my grandpa."
The previous year, she'd opened up during an episode of her show about how her love
for sardines was rooted in her grandfather.
A typical day in his company, Ray explained, meant hanging out with his friends and eating
"sardine sandwiches with lots of onions."
That wasn't the first time Ray had alluded to sardine memories with her grandpa, either.
In 2007, she confessed to People that her lunchbox made her very unpopular in grade
school, saying,
"I had the lunchbox that cleared the cafeteria.
[...] Because I hung out with my grandfather, I started to bring my lunchbox with sardine
sandwiches and calamari that I would eat off my fingers like rings."
It should come as little surprise to anyone that Ray loves pizza.
She openly embraces her Italian roots, and it's no big secret that Italians pretty much
wrote the book on pizza.
In September 2018, Ray gave a nod to both of these things with a special edition of
her magazine, aptly titled "How to Live Like an Italian."
In one article, "share the pie" was listed as one of the pointers for living like a paisano.
A chef from Rosemary's Pizza in New York city explained,
"Pizza is an individual thing in Italy.
In America, it's more communal."
Either way, though, it's not a solitary food.
Ray's team advised,
"No matter how you slice it (or don't), pizza is a social activity that is best shared with
others."
And it would seem Ray has that part down pat.
According to The New York Times, she has a wood-burning pizza oven in her kitchen.
So, if she and her husband choose to dine in, they can whip up a pizza anytime they
want.
Ray has used the term "sammie" so much in her career that there are literally comment
threads devoted to whether or not she is to blame for the invention of this cutesy sandwich
nickname.
In a ranking of Ray's most well-known catchphrases cataloged by HuffPost in 2013, "sammie" came
in second place.
Ray has a section of her website devoted to sammies.
She has used some of her favorite sammie recipes for a fun, silly, tasty segment called "Sammie
Smackdown."
So, you might say Ray lives that good sammie life, even going so far as to create her own
line of "soup and sammie" dishes.
She has so many recipes, in fact, that she probably couldn't narrow down her favorite
sammie if you asked her for just one.
But she probably would recommend, no matter what sammie you have, serving it with soup.
A 2008 post on her website reads:
"What's better than a versatile soup and sammie combo?
It makes a great weekend lunch or weekday lunch box specialty for adults and kids alike."
If you consider how much Ray uses wine in her cooking, it sort of qualifies as a food,
right?
Bottom line: Wine is an important part of Ray's daily dietary habits — and her fascination
with it started early — like, really early.
During a November 2018 interview with actor-writer-director Alan Alda, Ray revealed a hilarious anecdote
about how "vino" wound up being her first word.
She explained,
"So [my grandpa] got sick of chasing the formula bottle, because I would throw, literally chuck
the bottle across the room out of my crib.
[...] So he started taking the bottle and filling it with water and adding a little
of his fancy wine.
And he would hold up my baba, and go, 'Vino, vino.
Vino, vino.'"
Subsequently, there's an old Polaroid in circulation with baby Ray reaching her hand up in the
air that reads, "Rachael's first word: vino, vino."
"Everybody thought I was a good baby but really I was just bombed."
These days, Ray has a deep appreciation for wine.
She said in Rachael Ray Every Day in September 2018,
"If you want to enjoy your life more, you might try living it more like an Italian.
A big laugh, a glass of wine, time to talk and laugh with each other, taking a moment
to notice the simple pleasures — these are the keys to quality of life."
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