“Rachael Ray Has A Lot On Her Plate” Transcript

Priya Krishna: Hi, this is Priya Krishna and you're listening to Radio Cherry Bombe. You're the bombe.

Kerry Diamond: Hi, Bombesquad. Welcome to Radio Cherry Bombe. I'm your host Kerry Diamond, so our producer Jess Zeidman and I, just left the green room at the Rachael Ray Studios. I sat down with Rachael to talk about her new book, Rachael Ray 50 Memory's and Meals From a Sweet and Savory Life. I had never met Rachael before. So I had no idea what to expect, but she is fascinating and complex and absolutely speaks her mind as you are about to discover. We had a great time talking to her.

Kerry Diamond: Let's thank Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Schools and Emmi Cheese from Switzerland for supporting this show. You folks are the bomb. Before we get to Rachael, let's do some housekeeping. The Radio Cherry Bombe Podcast tour is headed to Miami on November 18th it's our very first event in that city. It will be taking place at chef Lorena Garcia's brand new restaurant CHICA. Tickets are on sale now at cherrybombe.com and they are $30 worth every penny. If you ask me. Thank you to Kerrygold for supporting our tour and maybe you saw this on Instagram, but now we have Cherry Bombe memberships. You can become a card carrying member of the Bombesquad. Join now through December 31st to become a founding member and get first dibs on tickets. Access to special members only events and meet-ups and your founding member card.

Kerry Diamond: We have a lot of fun surprises in the works. Memberships are $25 and the price will go up in 2020 so don't delay. It's almost time for Rachael Ray. Let's hear a word from our friends at Emmi and we'll be right back with our chat.

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Kerry Diamond: Let's get right to Rachael. She tells us the story of how her first big hit, 30 minute Meals was born.

Rachael Ray: I moved upstate and I just started over and I grew up working in the restaurant business. So I went to work at the Sagamore managing their restaurants. I went to the only gourmet market in Upstate New York and applied, but they had no position open. Eventually the position of buyer opened there and I got that gig right away. My boss there, Donna was my friend, my very close friend to this day. She came to my wedding. We just went to Italy together a few weeks ago. I burn no bridges in life. So it was actually a gimmick to get our customers to buy more groceries. It's a lot of state workers and students and a few generations of double income households where people forgot or never learned how to cook, but at the time it was 30 minutes or less or your pizza's free.

Kerry Diamond: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Rachael Ray: So I figured if people were going to wait 30 minutes for a pizza, they would spend 30 minutes cooking. So Donna and I said, we should sell a series of cooking classes based on 30 minute meals. And I said, "Oh, that's great. Let's ask some of the local chefs to come in." Well Donna and I were such brilliant business people. This is why you shouldn't drink and write like a business plan. So Donna and I were having, I think we were at like at TGI Fridays or something in the mall where the Cowan & Lobel store was where I was working as the buyer. Right.

Rachael Ray: So we're sitting at the bar and we're like, "Oh, okay, so 30 minute meals. What do you think people would pay for a cooking class? Like say, it's like three hours and they spend the whole evening like, and they get to eat everything they cook and you know, it's like a party atmosphere. What do you think they'd spend?" And we're like, "Oh, let's try and sound for 40 bucks a class." We can fit 25 people in the production kitchen. Well we price the thing, we sell them, we're great sales ladies. We go out on the selling floor and we sell them to our customers. We're going to have this cooking class series. But then we went and asked all the local chefs what they would charge us to teach the cooking classes.

Kerry Diamond: Oh no.

Rachael Ray: I know, exactly. So Donna said, "Well, they love your food. They buy all your prepared food out of the case every day. So why don't you teach the class?"

Rachael Ray: I said, "Well, don't you think they'd actually want a proper chef? And someone that they recognize from like one of the local restaurants? I don't think so. They're paying you for your food."

Rachael Ray: So Donna came in, was my sous chef, and we started a three hour cooking class.It was 30, 30 minute meals. So I taught six base recipes and there were five ... If I taught you the one base in class, there were four of the recipes for that thing. So you get five versions of ... Once, you learn how to make a cutlet ... You can do this with it and that and this with it. So it was five different ways you could apply each of six things. So if you gave us three hours, we would give you essentially a month of food that you could prepare for yourself. And it was very successful. It became our best selling item. And then it turned into a segment on the local news and then that turned into people wanting it in a cookbook. Of course, no book seller would buy books because nobody knew who I was unless you lived in Upstate New York.

Rachael Ray: So I found a one woman publishing house, Hiroko Kiffner at Lake Isle Press and she made a deal with the grocery store Price Shopper to sell her books. And that's how I made my first $10,000 check selling cookbooks in grocery bins at Price Shopper.

Kerry Diamond: So how many-

Rachael Ray: Somebody gave one of those to Al Roker and that's how I got on the Today Show.

Kerry Diamond: That's how you got on the Today Show. Okay.

Rachael Ray: Exactly.

Kerry Diamond: Wow. So that was your big break.

Rachael Ray: Well also a friend of mine, Joe Donahue, worked in public radio and his guest canceled last minute and he called me at the store, Cowan Lobel and said, "Rach, my guest canceled. You have to come over and do a 30 minute meal."

Rachael Ray: I said, "That's illegal. It's against fire code and it's the radio. People can't see what I'm doing."

Rachael Ray: And he's like, "I don't care. We got to a hot plate, please just come over and we'll cook in the studio."

Rachael Ray: So I made jambaleika like a jambalaya, but you can make it in 30 minutes on a hot plate in Joe's studio. And a guy named Lou Equis was lecturing at the culinary school in Hyde Park and he called his friend Bob Tuschman who ran Food Network at the time. And Lou, told Bob, he should check out this girl. He doesn't know what I look like. He doesn't know how I'd be on TV. But I'm pretty hilarious cooking on the radio. It appears that I have this little cookbook that they sell in the local grocery store. So Bob Tuschman gets sort of duped into thinking I'm somebody from somewhere because all of a sudden I'm on the Today Show, like that Monday, like just a couple of days later. And I'm only on the Today Show because Al Roker is also an Upstate New Yorker and a New Yorker, New Yorker. And Michelle, his producer had saved this little cookbook that someone gave him like as a neighbor gift and she put it into a file folder and a huge snow storm was coming to New York.

Rachael Ray: And so everyone had canceled except Arlen Specter was being interviewed by Katie Couric. He's the only person who didn't cancel. So they had no guests. And that's how I really got my big break. And then while I was on with Al, Bob Tuschman is like, "Wait, that's the girl Lou Equis just called me about." So the first thing I tell them when I go to Food Network is I don't belong here. And you've been duped. Like this is just a fluke. And I try and tell them the whole backstory and I said, "I'm beer out of the bottle. You're champagne, no harm, no foul. Check you later."

Kerry Diamond: So you're trying to talk them out of hiring.

Rachael Ray: I did, and I stood up to leave and they're like, "No, no. That's why we like you. Because you're a normal person." I'm like, "okay, fine." Let's sit it on back down.

Kerry Diamond: Would you still call yourself a normal person today?

Rachael Ray: Yeah, of course. I still call Bob Tuschman, my friend too. He just asked me if I can come and lecture. He's a professor now.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah, he's a big deal. You wrote in the book that you're a waitress at heart.

Rachael Ray: Of course.

Kerry Diamond: And a cook in your soul.

Rachael Ray: I'm a service industry professional. It is my job to serve people. That's essentially a waitress. You try and figure out what they're ordering or what they'd like to see and you try and deliver that. When I write for the show, I don't write for me. I write for ... I mean I do to some extent of course, but I write for what I think people are into and it's really fun now because we do segments called Food For Thought, where I cook vegan or Quito or pescatarian or whatever and explore all the new ways that people are eating. And then you got your regular what's for dinner tonight at the end. And I'm cooking for the Food Network app now, which is a skill oriented. I teach you how to Spatchcock a chicken and then we specifically show you one recipe to make with a Spatchcock chicken. I still make 30 Minute Meals 20 years later, but now we can shoot them in a super fresh, cool way where you see every second of it. Like you can watch it online and see everything that happened and we really just legit start a clock and that's it.

Rachael Ray: You have the capability now. We used to have to rehearse one, act at a time, take the food out of the pan, and I demanded that it be my food. So we get the pan hot again, put the food back in, and then rehearse the next act, so on and so forth. Now I do four shows. It's not even noon. When I shot for Food Network a couple of weeks ago, I shot my personal record, 25 episodes in three days.

Kerry Diamond: Oh my God. Okay.

Rachael Ray: My personal best in a year is 263 episodes of television. One calendar year.

Kerry Diamond: You're still standing or sitting today?

Rachael Ray: No, actually I'm sitting.

Kerry Diamond: So let's talk about this book. So I love this book.

Rachael Ray: Oh, I was going to talk about yours because it's so cool.

Kerry Diamond: I love our cookbook too. We brought you a little Cherry Bombe packet of things.

Rachael Ray: I love that. Thank you, baby.

Kerry Diamond: You're welcome. But Rachael Ray 50. So I just turned 50 so this book means a lot to me. So-

Rachael Ray: Yeah, well it meant a lot to me, and the premise of the book is gratitude, showing people that the American dream, no matter how torn apart we may feel at this moment in history/ The American dream is very much alive and well. And that if you work harder than anybody else and truly value work itself and start from that place, I'm not saying my life will happen, but things will happen for you. You will be given opportunities. And then if you can close your eyes and envision yourself trying something, it's very freeing. If you're not afraid of where you come from and you can value any job, like I can value being a dish machine operator, that's a tricky one to do.

Rachael Ray: But if you can do whatever you're doing with grace, it's a very freeing moment to realize that because you can then try anything because the worst that can happen is you go back jabberwocky to where you came from. And if you're not ashamed of that, then you can always try to move forward. Nothing bad can really happen. So that's the overall purpose of the book.

Kerry Diamond: It's so personal, the book.

Rachael Ray: I didn't want to write a memoir because I'm not a negative person. I don't feel like I would change anything in my life-

Kerry Diamond: Why is a memoir necessarily negative.

Rachael Ray: Because you have to cover every bit of the ground. Do you know what I mean? And I don't want to relive every miserable moment. I want to live the funny moments or the moments that are accessible for other people to relate to. I don't want to talk about being mugged. I want to talk about being an awkward celebrity because that's relatable. We've all been in an awkward situation where you're not comfortable in your clothing or your shoes. You're afraid you're not going to be the popular kid at the dance vibe. Like we've all been that person. I write a lot about work. I write a lot about travel and having an adventurous spirit because I don't believe you have to be rich to have that. I had it when I was poor.

Rachael Ray: So I share the moments that I think express how I was raised and what I've learned in 50 years to inspire people not to wait ever, and that as long as you wake up in the morning, that's a fresh notebook. You can literally write the rest of your life beginning that moment.

Kerry Diamond: And you're a girl who loves a notebook.

Rachael Ray: I love notebooks. Everything I do in my life. The end papers of this book are my notebooks. I draw on blue pads because I design furniture and kitchen products and things. I draw on blue pads and I do grocery lists on blue pads. But notebooks are where everything I've ever written, 26 books now, everything I've made for my family. The first time my mom and I went to Italy, there's two notebooks, a hundred and something pages, each of just what was coming out of my mother's mouth. So I wouldn't forget it because she never talks about herself.

Rachael Ray: Italians are very, kind of private. They're boisterous at a party or boisterous with the family or something, but you don't talk about yourself, you just don't do it. It's vulgar, you know? But in Italy, my mother, couldn't shut her up. So I was writing down all of the stories of her childhood and grandpa's childhood and stuff. My whole life is cataloged in notebooks first. And I talk about it in this book when I was a little girl, my mom said, "Why is everything ... Why do you only draw women or girls?"

Rachael Ray: And I said, "Well that's clearly a giraffe. That's a man. That's a fish. I don't know what you're talking about."

Rachael Ray: And she said, They all have purses."

Rachael Ray: I said, "That's not a purse. That is where they keep their notebooks and their pencils."

Rachael Ray: Like I was so angry and frustrated that she didn't understand the importance of having your notebook and your pencil.

Kerry Diamond: Oh, that's so cute. What was it about turning 50 though? Because you said that age was never really an issue with you.

Rachael Ray: I think 30s no big deal, 40s no big deal. I always rounded up so I wouldn't care. By the time I got there and when I got there, I didn't care either. Fifty is a milestone, you know that you're probably closer to the end than the beginning, sadly. And really it was just looking back and wanting to say something, wanting to say anybody could do this. Wanting to get people excited about work and being adventurous and living every day of their life. Was the vibe.

Kerry Diamond: We'll be right back with Rachael Ray after this quick break.

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Kerry Diamond: So tell me what you would do if you were starting out today.

Rachael Ray: Oh, I don't even know. Like, I think that things are so easy for anyone to get their voice out there now and that's so exciting. I guess, I would start the same way I started with 30 Minute Meals. Pick one thing that's niche that's accessible, that makes a promise, you have to have the lane that you're going to drive in. So I would still start with that and I would still start with small creative ways to publish of which now there are so many. You can put yourself up on YouTube as we all know now. I would just start all over again, kind of what we did. But without a TV station it would just be me in somebody's kitchen, which that's how we rolled it out on the TV show. Was we did a piece on the classes and then I'd go to someone's home or firehouse or classroom or senior center and teach someone how to make dinner. Like hands-on, show them, do this, do what I'm doing. And so I would just do that.

Kerry Diamond: So back to the whole work thing. Why do you work so damn hard? You don't have to now.

Rachael Ray: I love the feeling of it. I suck at doing nothing. My husband and I are both like this. We're very like twitchy people. He's a lawyer, but he has a rock and roll band and he can be in his studio for 20 hours, sleep four and go right back in. I don't know that he loves reading contracts for 20 hours. But I mean that's who he is. For me, when I'm not here, I'm in a kitchen or I'm working at something, I'm drawing, I'm typing, I'm writing. I love to watch movies, I love to hang out and do all that, but I have to do a certain amount of work. I have to exhaust my body and my mind or I can't relax at all.

Rachael Ray: We collectively decided the only long vacation I've ever had is when I got married and we took a three week long break. We gave up after two weeks we're like, "We just cannot do this. Like this is ... I've taken 650 pictures with film." I don't even know when I would ever get time to have them printed. And it took me like a year to make that album and then later got rained on when my living room sprang a leak. So all his pictures are all like washed out now, but I just don't have the stomach to throw them in a garbage. I'm a basket case.

Rachael Ray: Anyway. We were so bored, we just had to get back to work.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah.

Rachael Ray: Like who leaves their honeymoon? Like it was-

Kerry Diamond: You.

Rachael Ray: People looked at us like we were insane, but he's like, "Yeah, I can't take it anymore and it's too much. I've read six books."

Rachael Ray: I said, "I've read six books and I've written a book and I've taken 600 pictures. I got to get out of here."

Kerry Diamond: Will you ever retire?

Rachael Ray: When I'm dead?

Kerry Diamond: When you're dead, okay.

Rachael Ray: I'll always be doing something.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah.

Rachael Ray: My mom's 85 and she's outside with the cats and carrying wood and like moving stuff around. She's a tough guy. I don't know that we're those people. We're just not those people. I mean, I don't know that I'll ... This is a very ... I have nothing to do with whether or not I have a job in television that will be dependent upon whether or not people are sick of watching us or not or reading us. But I like to work. I can't just do nothing.

Kerry Diamond: So tell me what else is on your, to do list over the next few years?

Rachael Ray: I've studied so many languages for so many years and I'm not really fluent in any of them, so I want to fine tune that. Master the drums. I've had drum lessons, several points. All the things that I've picked up and dropped and picked up and dropped and picked up and dropped. Just go pick them up again. I don't really plan. I like to let them develop on their own, naturally. I just started this Moxie Made, it's all female artisan shopping site that's not really about shopping. It's about female empowerment, sharing stories with other women. We have a couple of models, which I pick. Like I pick women that look not like everybody else, but most of our models are my friends.

Rachael Ray: A lot of cancer survivors, a lot of people that are self-made or that invented themselves after they turned 40 or after they turned 50. So it's a site about a lot of stuff. But I also have my own line of Italian natural leathers. It's a closed circle. Absolutely no chemicals are ever used. The animals are responsibly raised. They are farmed, they're used to feed people. But all of the leathers, no matter what color in the rainbow, it's all vegetable product and it goes back into the earth. It's really beautiful art. And there's a group, a co op of about it's 11 families, but 25 different labels of people that do this and they're the last people on earth that do this.

Rachael Ray: The only people that purchase these leathers are like, Hermes, Paul Smith. Not there's anything wrong with that. Great. But they sell their stuff for a lot of money. So we met these peeps and I said, "What's the absolute best price you can give us for this quality?" So we make all of my products and make very little to sell to everybody. So I love drawing belts and bags, now. I love designing furniture because it brings back American jobs.

Kerry Diamond: I don't know how you do everything you do.

Rachael Ray: I love it. It's fun.

Kerry Diamond: How do you keep everything organized?

Rachael Ray: In notebooks and on blue pads and that's why I ... And also you have all these partners, you don't have to be organized if you're working with people and your main goal is to do as much as you can in America and bring back upholstery as an art form and bring back apprentices. And bring back American made. Case goods you still have to get from China because nobody here makes them period. Unless you're going to like a super, super artisan and they're like making the inside of your furniture yourself. But you find people that are like minded and they work with you. The animal food. We've given away 35 and a half or $36 million to non kill shelters.

Kerry Diamond: Wow, that's remarkable.

Rachael Ray: Based on the fact that I was scared to feed my dog if I wasn't home cooking for her. That's what started it. People were poisoning their animals with imported foods from China and the like, because they're not regulated. So people were killing their cats and dogs. Can you imagine? You murdered your own animal. Horrible. Right. So I started with the company that was then called Dad's, Ainsworth was the parent company. Now Smucker's owns the rights to the product, but we work together. They've never changed the recipe that we only make things better and more diets for animals is up, but because I cooked for my dog and was afraid to feed her other stuff, I can't even imagine how many animals are alive with $35 million. You know? It's crazy.

Kerry Diamond: That's amazing.

Rachael Ray: And our brand since day one, a portion of everything I've ever sold since the minute we started went to our Yum-o, which is now Rachael Ray Foundation to feed hungry people, to provide them water, to improve school food and to provide scholarships through the National Restaurant Association for any public school kid who wants to go into anything food-related.

Kerry Diamond: That's amazing. You're not well known for doing that for. From my perspective.

Rachael Ray: I don't think that you should do charity to go around and tell people about it. I mean, I bring it up when you look back over your life and say, "How do you do this or how do you do that?" You find people that are like minded.

Kerry Diamond: But people know the animal part of what you do and how much you care for animals and the shelters that have been funded but I don't think know about-

Rachael Ray: It started, that business model started with what we did for humans first. To eradicate hunger among American children. And my lifetime was the original goal and we'd put the money into three different pots. Food relief, improving school food programs is the only access that children have or should have 12 months a year in my opinion. To proper nutrition. And then a third of our money to scholarship dollars. That's been since the first pan. Anything I ever sold and that model was successful. And that's the model that we used for the pet food thing. Pet food thing came years after we had set up the model for the brand to fund.

Rachael Ray: Because we all go to these things, these charity things where people spend like $25,000 on two concert tickets for a handshake or something and that's great. But then they ended up spending 20 of your 25 grand to pay for the party that y'all just went to, where you ate cold chicken that probably made you sick. Like I didn't want to do that. So literally, I think it was President Clinton who was on the television show and he said, "You should just use a business model and sell something that you believe in and use that to fund. Don't make it about events and donations and all that."I went, "Huh, well, all right, that's a very good idea. I want an oval spaghetti pot because spaghetti is long."

Rachael Ray: And so it started with that.

Kerry Diamond: So with everything you do, what do you ultimately want your legacy to be?

Rachael Ray: I don't know. I'll be dead. I have no idea. I don't know that I'll have a legacy. I hope that the world was slightly better fed because I was here and that people were kinder to each other, that they were maybe a little more adventurous. That like the magazine, the motto of the magazine was take a bite out of life. I've never believed, and I wasn't raised by people that believed that adventure and fun has a price tag. And that's the point of this sort of storytelling, is to get people to not be so worried about the cash. I've never worked for money in my life. I've never made a business decision based on just the cash, like period.

Rachael Ray: I got one yesterday, I got a huge offer yesterday and I said, "No, no, thank you. I'm good."

Rachael Ray: And they're like, "But it's the blah, blah, blah and the yada, yada. And you've got to, and it's the thing in the ... Nope, but what if it was X?" You know?

Kerry Diamond: No.

Rachael Ray: I don't care. I already got five jobs.

Kerry Diamond: I mean, based on what I've read in the book, a lot of it seems to be the example your mom set.

Rachael Ray: Absolutely.

Kerry Diamond: When you were watching her in the restaurant.

Rachael Ray: Absolutely.

Kerry Diamond: And then you were washing dishes in the restaurant.

Rachael Ray: Yeah.

Kerry Diamond: Yeah.

Rachael Ray: My mom always look people in the eye too. I really valued that. She stood up on a milk crate if she had to. My mom's ... Now, she's like four, nine maybe, but she was four foot 11 in her heyday. And a lot of the people she would direct in the restaurants were big, tall guys. And she refused to direct and man that she couldn't look in the eye. So she would carry this milk crate around with her and put the milk crate down and stand up on the milk crate so she could square off to them. And make sure that they understood clearly what she was specifically explaining to them or telling them.

Kerry Diamond: I love this image of your mom dragging around the milk crate.

Rachael Ray: She's amazing.

Kerry Diamond: You wrote in the book, you would never have a restaurant, but you have virtual restaurants now.

Rachael Ray: Like yeah, but they call them virtual restaurants and it's super cool. It's super fun.

Kerry Diamond: Do you not like that term.

Rachael Ray: Well, because it's not real. It's not like-

Kerry Diamond: It's virtual.

Rachael Ray: It's not like I get a whole menu, you know what I mean? Like I didn't write, here's 18 sides. It's an interesting, fun, fresh way.

Kerry Diamond: So we're talking about Rachael's partnership with Uber Eats.

Rachael Ray: Yes. With Uber Eats. And I'm very thrilled with it. It's a fun way to get food from the book. Brought to life. In a bunch of different markets. I would have a restaurant, I've tried to have a restaurant over the years. It just hasn't worked out.

Kerry Diamond: Oh, you have. Oh, I didn't realize that.

Rachael Ray: Yeah, I mean every time I find a place I like one thing or another falls apart or the economy falls apart, one or the other. It's just never worked out. If something feels right to me, I do it. If it doesn't present itself, I don't do it.

Kerry Diamond: Weirdly, Food Network folks haven't had the easiest time opening restaurants.

Rachael Ray: Well, some, yes, some, no. I mean Bobby's-

Kerry Diamond: But he had-

Rachael Ray: Great story.

Kerry Diamond: He had them before he ...

Rachael Ray: Yes, he didn't have Bobby's Burgers.

Kerry Diamond: Right.

Rachael Ray: Right. He didn't become baby Danny Meyer. So some of them do and some of them don't. It's just never worked out for me. But this was a fun way to bring the book to people in a fresh way. And in each of the markets we're in, 250 people get the book. Like it just comes with food.

Kerry Diamond: Oh, that's fun.

Rachael Ray: Isn't that fun? Yeah, so that's super cool. If they like the program, I would love to do the equivalent of a virtual restaurant in that I would just write a seasonal menu and that would be fun. I don't know, we'll see where it goes. But right now it was done as, literally a vehicle to drive people to understand the book and we figure if they can taste it, they might want to experience it. So we took from all over the book. There's wings and grits from South by Southwest and my other love is music. We run this enormous day long and several smaller shows during the nights leading up to it. This big thing called Feedback. It's my food-

Kerry Diamond: In Austin. You love Austin.

Rachael Ray: In Austin, yeah. On three different stages. So the food that I write for that, some of that's in here. Some of the recipes are from Tuscany where we go every year and bring all of our friends like the only like crazy, you would need a pretty good paycheck to do it thing, that I do in my life is I do bring about 40 something people with me every year to Italy. It used to be a 100. I've cut way back.

Kerry Diamond: Wow.

Rachael Ray: And we go there to celebrate our anniversary and all the cooks, cook with me in the kitchen. I write all the menus and my friends, once they come in and kind of in drips and drabs. Once everybody gets there, everybody can participate and contribute dishes. But I write the first two main menus and then my chefy friends add onto those and the musicians sing for their supper. So we have these uber concerts at night and these big feast. And we bring the party with us. So there's a lot of the food and fun from that in the book. And there's the stuff that I make, like privately. Like at home for my family that probably wouldn't sell so well on TV, but I like it and my family likes it or just things that take too long. Like when I roll a porchetta, I let it sit around for three days before I cook the thing.

Rachael Ray: I'm not going to get that going over the Food Network or here on the daytime show. That's not something mom or dad can rock for supper that day, so.

Kerry Diamond: All right, so because we're Cherry Bombe, we have to ask a question about being a woman in food and you were doing it forever. I mean you were a great presence on television. When it was a very broey time and food. You were there on television.

Rachael Ray: Well, that's to Food Network and Bob Tuschman's credit and my mentor and my dear friend Brooke Johnson in the later years, who's my dear, dear friend and just has been a rock for me. I've learned so much from her. But Bob is the ... And the group of people that work there, then. It was the group of people that were in charge at Food Network that let someone not in a chef coat, make their food their way and do whatever I wanted with the half an hour. So that's cool.

Rachael Ray: Brooke is wildly talented producer. She worked with Regis years ago. She worked at A&E. She was just a brilliant, brilliant woman. Learned a ton from her.

Kerry Diamond: But for a lot of people in this country when they had to think of who is the woman in food who they know of, it was you.

Rachael Ray: Okay. I mean I don't know how to answer that. I'll say this about being a woman that works in food, especially since you know MeToo and people talk so much about fair pay, equal pay and does the woman get paid as much as the man. Emerald got paid more than anybody else in the history of Food Network. To my knowledge, I think it was $10 million or some crazy kooky number and he deserves it. He used to do five to seven shows a day where people were still building sets behind him. He created the genre of, it's a party. It's not just a cooking show. Julia Child got everybody to like not be afraid to go in the kitchen. Jacques Pepin made you want to live in the kitchen. Like the Galloping Gourmet made you laugh in the kitchen and use more cream and butter until his later years. Then Graham switched over actually, but.

Rachael Ray: There's people that have brought all these different things over the years. I never made the equal of Emerald, but I also got paid a lot more than a lot of other men and I'd never worked for the goal of being, I make the most. And I never cared what other people were making because it was none of my business. As a woman in this business, I really do feel I was very lucky over the years to have been treated very well. I've had male bosses and female bosses. I've made choices where I got paid less, but I did it knowingly for a bargain.

Rachael Ray: I would ask a partner, a company that was partnering with our company if we could work in a different facility. If I took less, could we spend more on the space? Could we spend more on the staff? And I will literally cut my own foot off just so I can have my vision. The vision is more important to me. So while I am sympathetic and empathetic and champion, always. My fellow woman, nothing pisses me off more than a woman that rips another woman down, nothing. I find nothing more vulgar, disgusting. There's been people I've banned from this show because I didn't care for their behavior.

Rachael Ray: So I'm very mindful of that. But if I look back at my own life, I'm super grateful. I had a lot of strong women that were well-respected and I was treated well by men and women. And when I got less money, it's because I took less money. I made that choice. Nobody was going to bully me one way or another. I made the call and I decided that some things were worth the cost and worth more than the cash.

Kerry Diamond: Well, sadly, we're out of time.

Rachael Ray: That sucks.

Kerry Diamond: But you've been-

Rachael Ray: This was so fun.

Kerry Diamond: I know, I know we could have you on the show for like an hour.

Rachael Ray: So come back, let's do another bombe.

Kerry Diamond: You've been ...

Kerry Diamond: That's it for today's show. Thank you to Rachael and her team for making this interview happen. If you're a Rachael fan, you will love her new cookbook. Rachael Ray 50, Memory's And Meals From a Sweet and Savory Life. Thank you to Le Cordon Bleu Culinary Schools and Emmi Cheeses from Switzerland for supporting this show. Don't forget you can become an official member of the Bombesquad. Snag a Cherry Bombe membership at cherrybombe.com. You can get a founding membership now through December 31st for just $25 and the podcast tour is headed to Miami on November 18th. Tickets are on sale now. Radio Cherry Bombe is edited, engineered and produced by, you know it Jess Zeidman.

Kerry Diamond: Cherry Bombe is powered by Audrey Payne, Maria Sanchez, Donna Yen, Kia Damone and our publisher is Kate Miller-Spencer. Our theme song is, All Fired Up by the band Tralala. Thanks for listening everybody. You are the bomb.

When Harry Met Sally Clip: I'll have what she's having.

Kelly Barnhart: Hi, my name is Kelly Barnhart and I'm the owner of Vibrant in Houston, Texas. Do you want to know who I think is the bomb? Katie Barnhart. Owner of Adair Kitchen, Bebidas, Eloise Nichols, Betsey's, and now Los Tios in Houston while accompanying my brother as he was attending Stanford business school, it was commonplace to overhear what entrepreneurial gods the students were being groomed to be. All the while off to the side, she was quietly planning a healthy-ish all day cafe before that was ever a thing.

Kelly Barnhart: She opened Adair Kitchen almost immediately after their return to Houston in 2012 to smashing success. She hit a nerve. Seemingly effortlessly. She has since expanded her empire to include five additional new concepts with more on the way. Making it all seems so easy as a mother. She inspires the belief that anything is possible.