Her daytime talk show is about to tape its 500th episode and there are 190,000 people waiting for tickets, according to officials at the show. Ray says the success of the daytime show still delights her though it is vastly different with its live audience and celebrity guests than her Food Channel show, "Thirty Minute Meals with Rachael Ray."
"There's certainly a noticeable difference between talking to your vegetables for seven or eight years alone with your friends on cable and sitting down on a sofa or at a kitchen table talking with all these people," she said. "That was a huge transition. It certainly felt like a rocket ship ride to me."
The rocket was launched in upstate New York. Ray worked in a food specialty store and thought maybe the reason people weren't buying the groceries is they didn't know how to cook with them. She couldn't persuade local chefs to come in and do food demonstrations, so she herself started little in-store classes. The classes were such a success they led to appearances on the "Today" show, and then on the Food Network. Oprah Winfrey saw something special in her, and voila -- a new daytime star was born.
Ray reportedly earns upwards of $18 million dollars a year now from her various ventures. When asked about her income she said she has "no idea" how much money she earns annually, but admitted "it makes me a little sick. It makes my stomach flip. I'm not comfortable with it ... because I don't like to think of my life as that far away from me. People that make that kind of money -- it's just too foreign of an idea."
She can recall a time when her hands trembled at the grocery store register, "because I didn't know if I had enough money for the groceries. And it was like $60, and I thought I'm going to have to be that lady that chooses between the toilet paper and the chicken breasts."
When she's not taping, Ray wears pajamas and sweats, and shops at Target and TJ Maxx. She said she's beer in the bottle, not champagne in a flute. And that's just the way she intends to stay. "When I do a 30-minute meal, for instance, on Food Network, that's my food you see at the end of the show and it's not perfect. And if sometimes things break or drop or the pasta hits the wall when I'm draining it, they never stop tape. They just kind of let me go with it. And I get stains on my shirt -- oh well -- we keep shooting. It's not too perfect. "
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