Meeting Rachael Ray

I love New York. Only here (well, and may be LA) can you have a friend casually call you up to see if you want to join him for Rachael Ray’s 1st Anniversary Party for her magazine, Everyday with Rachael Ray. The huge fan that I am, I excitedly accepted!

Y’all may recall from my interview for Myself magazine in Germany that the Food Network played an instrumental role in my cooking, particularly Rachael Ray. Up until a couple years ago, I really knew nothing about cooking and was actually quite frightened of it. I began watching the Food Network and discovered the bright-eyed Rachael Ray. I originally began watching her just because I loved her personality and just wanted to hang out with her, but soon I also saw that she made everything look so easy and the fear of cooking slowly faded away. With time I became an avid cook and now even write a food blog! So you can understand why I was so excited to go to her party!

As you can imagine, she had a swarm of people following her through out the night so it never occurred to me to go up to her. However, towards the end of the evening the crowd was lightening up around her and my friend Erik convinced me to say hello. Now, living in New York we see celebrities all the time so it shouldn’t be that big of a deal. However, as I stood there waiting to get her attention my nerves were growing exponentially per minute!

Finally she turned towards me and in my dorky, quivering voice I said that I wanted to introduce myself to her and then went on to explain the influence she had in my cooking. I then added that I now write a food blog, and with this she got so excited—genuinely excited. In fact, she asked for a pen and wrote down the address! Of course my nerves were still going strong so I unfortunately missed half of what she said, but I was really impressed by how nice and sincere she was. I found that in person she is just like how she is on TV.

A lot of the people at the event were also commenting on how amazing it was that she was actually talking to everyone who approached her through out the evening. Apparently at these types of events when a celebrity is being featured, the celebrity keeps a “wall” up between themselves and the guests. I was certainly impressed.

So that was the highlight of my week!