Racing Rachael Ray

When I was a teenager, my mom and I were more like roommates than mother and son. We were barges passing each other, hauling our cargo, sinking in the water, displacing everything around us. 

The one thing we bonded over was Rachael Ray’s 30 Minute Meals on Food Network, in the six o’clock hour. Ray is Sicilian, as is my mother, as is half my genome. Mom loved Ray’s homey studio kitchen and equally homey charm and authentic chuckle, and I had a giant crush on Ray—something about her laugh, her fluid ease, the concussion of her smashing garlic on the cutting board and saying that, on a date, two garlics cancel each other out. I fantasized about wooing her with a fine bruschetta with balsamic reduction.  

Mom sat on the couch and I on a nearby love seat, and we watched Ray miraculously make meals. Eventually, my mother grew skeptical. “There’s no way she can do that in thirty minutes,” she’d say. 

“She’s making it right before our eyes,” I’d say. “It’s not like when Emeril Lagasse pulls a fully prepped casserole from below the counter.” 

“Look, she’s got all her ingredients ready.” 

“They’re not all cut up, and she is smart enough to have her pans waiting for her.” 

I could see Mom’s gears turning. Finally, one night, she declared, “I’m going to see if I can cook one of these meals in thirty minutes.” 

I had never seen my mother more motivated by anything in all the years I’d known her.  

~~~

Mom had the skill—she had the cooking chops of any self-respecting Sicilian, with a special knack for comfort food and decadent pastas that I inherited but which skipped my older sister (much to her family’s chagrin)—but she didn’t have the drive; her separation from my father when I was twelve had all but extinguished her will to do much of anything besides punch the clock at work. To be clear, this wasn’t the lovesick feeling of depression, but residual exhaustion from a two-decade-plus loveless marriage finally and mercilessly ended. Her flame had long been extinguished, and she’d begun a decades-long process of dying in place, one episode of Law & Order, one Hallmark movie, and one thirty-minute meal at a time. 

But she would try and cook beef Stroganoff in thirty minutes, even though that would require boiling water for egg noodles and making something like a roux.  

I set a timer.  

~~~

Before long, I could smell the onions and the garlic, hear their sizzle. 

But it wasn’t just the smells from the kitchen that were so inviting. It was the sounds of Mom at the cutting board, the clunking of the knife as it sliced through the onions; it was the wooden spoon stirring the sauce. She was breathing hard, like some Iron Chef contestant running around a kitchen stadium, cursing the clock. I heard her turning the knobs on our ancient, coil-burner electric stovetop. She was hunched over the stove, moving from one ingredient to the next. 

“Fifteen minutes down, fifteen to go,” I said. 

Amid the commotion, I sensed her panic. She had never moved this fast, not in my lifetime. This was the closest thing to purpose I’d ever seen from my mother. She was out to prove something—to herself, to Rachael Ray, maybe to everyone who believed in the seeming bullshit premise of the show. Who can do all that in thirty minutes? Whatever the motivation, it seemed to be working. 

~~~

Some twenty years later, I still think about that night. The chair I sat in while she hustled and sweated was the same chair I sat in when any number of girls broke my heart and Mom would look over at my hangdog expression and say, “I wish I could take away your pain.” I’d take a deep breath and sink deeper into the chair, and sometimes she’d come over and rub my back in that motherly way of trying to make me feel at least 1 percent better. Sometimes, I dropped anchor and found safe harbor beside her. 

I ask her if she remembers “challenging” Rachael Ray to cook the beef Stroganoff in thirty minutes, a memory so vivid that it must be tucked somewhere the dementia can’t get it.  

“No, I don’t,” she says. 

But I do. 

~~~

When I was at college, at UMass Amherst, Rachael Ray came to Northampton, MA, a couple towns over. She was there to compete in “Iron Cook,” an Iron Chef knockoff with local chefs. The event was on Mom’s sixty-fifth birthday, so I bought tickets with excess student-loan money and drove two hours east to pick Mom up and then two hours back to western Massachusetts so we could watch our favorite cook cook. 

I was covering the event for the student newspaper, the Daily Collegian, my first-ever byline. I also took a bunch of pictures. At the start, there was a giant paper clock in the middle of the stage. Ray was silhouetted behind it, and she shook her booty, and my mother laughed. Then Ray cut the clock down the middle with her signature Wüsthof knife and burst through, waving furiously to the crowd, who cheered, “Rachael! Rachael! Rachael!” The event confirmed everything we loved about her: her thousand-kilowatt smile, her seeming comfort in her own body, and the way the audience composed mainly of middle-aged women felt some degree of kinship, felt that Ray understood their plight and knew how a thirty-minute meal brought them sanity. I took frequent peeks at Mom. She smiled broadly, her mouth smacking her Extra spearmint gum. She applauded with vigor, and often. 

Ray was narrowly defeated, and then I drove Mom two hours back home and myself, very drowsy by this point, two hours back to Amherst.  

~~~

“Five minutes, Mom,” I said. 

“I can’t do it,” she said. 

“Keep going, Mom.” 

She drained the noodles, and she was still feverishly working on the meat and the onions and the garlic and everything and maybe some people cook for love and maybe some people cook for a hobby and maybe some people cook for sport and even though she didn’t generally cook anything more inspired than pasta because she was too damn tired and I was out of the house now so really what was the point, finally my mom started plating, and I don’t need to tell you at this point that we’re past thirty minutes and nearly to forty, and she’d tell you she failed, but I’m here to tell you that meal was fucking delicious. 

Brendan O’Meara is the author of two works of narrative nonfiction, most recently The Front Runner: The Life of Steve Prefontaine (Mariner Books). He’s also the host and founder of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, an interview show he started in 2013. You can learn more about his work and newsletters at brendanomeara.com, or follow him on Instagram @creativenonfictionpodcast. 

This essay is a Short Reads original.