Description
Product Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • America’s favorite self-taught cook opens up about the most memorable moments of her life in this candid memoir-inspired cookbook featuring 125 all-new recipes.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BUZZFEED AND FOOD NETWORK
“No matter the recipe, each of us changes a dish by our own preparation of it. It’s the same with stories—once you put them out there, readers get to interpret them and be affected by them as they will. Ultimately, it’s my hope that this book leaves the reader with that quiet smile we all get after we eat a favorite comfort food. Basically, I’m going for the afterglow of a big bowl of spaghetti.”—from the Introduction
As her fiftieth birthday approached, the woman who taught America how to get dinner on the table, fast, started thinking not just about what to cook that night, but how her passion for food and feeding people had developed over her first fifty years.
Filled with twenty-five thoughtful essays and 125 delicious recipes,
Rachael Ray 50 reads like a memoir and a cookbook at once. Captured here are the moments and dishes Rachael finds most special, the ones she makes in her own home and that you won’t find on her television shows or in her magazine. Here are the memories that made her laugh out loud, or made her teary. The result is a collection that offers the perfect blend of kitchen and life wisdom, including thoughts on how we can all better serve the world and one another.
Also featured within these pages are gorgeous food photography, personal photos, and Rachael’s own hand-drawn illustrations, offering a revealing and intimate glimpse into her world and her every day inspiration.
About the Author
Rachael Ray is a multi-Emmy Award-winning syndicated television star, an iconic Food Network personality, bestselling cookbook author, founder and editorial director of her own lifestyle magazine,
Rachael Ray Every Day, and founder of the Yum-o! organization and The Rachael Ray Foundation. She splits her time between New York City and the Adirondacks with her husband, John, her family, and her beloved pit bull, Isaboo.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1
The Princess Who Lived in a Fort
Once upon a time, by a lakeside in the woods, there lived a beautiful little girl with dark wavy curls, rosy round cheeks, and a heart so big, a soul so bright, that her energy was boundless morning, noon, and night. My favorite fairy tale is actually the reality of my mother’s childhood. I’ve spent my life in pursuit of it, because the pictures in my head of how things once were are the most beautiful scenes imaginable to me.
My mother, Elsa Providenzia Scuderi, was born on July 18, 1934, the first of ten kids. She grew up in a house on the edge of Lake Champlain in Ticonderoga, New York. The main feature of the house was a tower of stone that helped to keep the house warm and cozy in the harsh, cold winter and cool during the long, hot days of summer. The tower stood at the heart of this home, and was actually a hand-stacked, artisan-crafted chimney that ran through the center of the house from bottom to top. It was built by her dad, my grandpa Emmanuel, a master stonemason. The house is gone now, but the stones of that tower still stand today. To look at it back then, I suppose to some people it was just the too-small house of a blue-collar worker with too many kids. To my mother, it was a fortress and she was a princess.
Growing up by a lake is wonderful in and of itself. (Mom would raise me on the same lake years later.) During their childhood summers, Elsa and her sisters would gather the tall grasses that grew by the lake and make skirts, while the boys swam and chased each other. The uncles would play tricks on the children, like diving deep and floating a hat on the water to make the kids think they’d drowned, then rising up like a lake monster to scare them! Grandpa would play his conce