Rachael Ray hasn’t only shown us how to cook. She’s also taught us that eating good food in combination with being healthy and active gives great results.
Rachel has always been keen on helping millions of finding a healthier lifestyle – despite having gone through personal tragedies herself.
Almost three years ago, Ray and her husband lost their Lake Luzerne, New York, home in a devastating fire. The fire started in the chimney and erased 15 years of memories, 40 years of notebooks, drawings, thoughts, and Rachael’s life’s work.
Before sitting down to have dinner with her husband, Rachael had Rachel prepare a fire in the fireplace. Then, suddenly, a man began screaming in their backyard.
”A person was going through our backyard on an ATV and was kind enough to come down the hill and say, ‘Your roof’s on fire.’ Literally screaming it in our backyard,” Ray said. “We went outside (and) sure enough, that was the case.”
Rachael then ”immediately” ran inside and upstairs to save her most ”precious things”.
“I heard the fire in the walls,” she said. “It was blood-curdling and chilling from head to toe. I turn to leave and there was a first responder right in front of me, (saying), ‘Get out, get out now. You have to go.'”
´ Not long after, they experienced the loss of their beloved Pit Bull, Isaboo, and a flood in their apartment.
This month, Rachael Ray’s daytime talk show, The Rachael Ray Show, began its seventeenth season. The season premiere gave viewers an inside look at Ray’s home in Tuscany, Italy, where she lives with her husband John Cusimano, and where she will host a variety of upcoming celebrity guests for the show.
In an exclusive interview for ET with Rachel Smith, Ray explained the obstacles she and her husband faced when renovating their Tuscan villa in the wake of personal loss.
“We purchased the land there over four years ago,” Ray explained to Smith. “So much has happened since then, but it took all that time to build it out, because we had to do it on Zoom. Who builds a house on Zoom? And in a different language.”
She continued for the ET interviewer, “And in the meantime, as everybody knows, we lost Isaboo, God rest her soul, and we lost our home, and our apartment flooded — I mean, it was a weird three years.”
Despite these challenges, Rachael Ray intends on exposing more of her personal life than ever before, allowing the cameras into her home and daily life to record the newest season of The Rachael Ray Show.
“I got over the fear — we always try to keep a little slice of our life private to us, but it’s actually — it’s very cathartic and freeing to include people, and we always shot the show mostly unscripted,” Ray told Smith. “And tried to be as real as possible with folks, from the earliest days at Food Network to everything certainly that we’ve tried to do here at this television production, but it became this strange thing. That first line, we talked about it, before when you cross the doorstep, ‘Oh my god,’ like, panic attack. We’re gonna let people in here.”
While most of us would hesitate to put our personal worlds on display, Ray continues to express excitement for upcoming episodes of the show filmed at her home and in her small community.
“It’s beautiful, and we love sharing it with people,” Ray explained for ET. “And I think people are going to be excited to see that world. We live in a very small town. It’s just like where we live Upstate. It’s a really small community. We know everybody. We go to the same places over and over again, we see the same faces over and over again, and it’s a very tiny, little community.”
Viewers can look forward to special friends and guests like Kate Hudson, Cameron Diaz, and Lorraine Bracco in Ray’s two kitchens and idyllic Italian community.
