I have been watching Rachael Ray’s 30 minutes food show for years. I am not a crazy fan though I do like her presentation style. What attracts me most is not her beauty but her magic and pleasant smile. You see, as in the picture, when she smiles, her big mouth stretches your nerves. In the show, when she talks, her not-so-sweet voice is bright and sexy. Her gesture and every movement invigorate you.

Rachael is a chef with no formal training. She grew up in a middle class family but is full of ambition. Her success seems both determined and accidental: working in food industry because her mother once owned a restaurant; teaching food preparation methods because she was working in a food store; doing food shows in a local TV station because somebody heard her talk in radio; and miraculously moving up to the national Food Network because the representative liked her presentation style. And the way she presents, I believe, is the secret of her success—always being pleasant, accommodating, and aggressive.

Watching Rachael’s show is a nice and relaxing experience. She makes common foods, foods that you and I eat everyday. She cooks haphazardly and chops vegetables and meats sort of randomly. She uses plain English to describe foods and the cooking process, offering a lot of tips and tricks rather than technical details. Thus, her foods look unprofessional and sometimes gross. A common end product is a bowl or plate of mixed foods in which all vegetables pile together with a grilled meat on top of it. Usually there is not much decoration around the foods. But it is this amateurism that appeals to many people. They feel that they can do it too.

Rachael’s recipes are changing these days. Her earlier programs featured many processed foods. A distinctive characteristic of her show is that she always grabs tens of cans using one hand. Needless to say, heating and mixing canned foods won’t take too much time. Facing the criticism that she is promoting unhealthy foods, nowadays she cuts more vegetables and fruits than before. In her recent shows, she has been working on big chunk of meat and fish laborously and cooking different types of foods simultaneously. She has also designed several home-made decorating styles. Yes, it will take more than 30 minutes for common people to prepare Rachael Ray’s foods.

In a sense, Rachael Ray is not an elite chef. She never claims herself an elite chef. Not a budding star anymore, Rachael Ray must be thinking more. Hopefully, she will bring us more ingeniously designed, ugly but tasty foods.