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By JANET K. KEELER, Times Staff WriterThe 30-Minute Meals maven may be fabulous, but her new magazine spins out of control.
Everyday with Rachael Ray is an exhausting new magazine that's going to be a very big hit.
With 17 photographs of Ray and an untold number of exclamation points, the premiere issue hit the shelves with a bang. Barnes & Noble reports that Everyday set a sales record for the chain, with 20,000 copies sold in the first week.
Ray's meteoric rise - she debuted in 2001 on the Food Network - appears to have no limits.
Get ready for a lot of Ray in the next year as the starmaker machinery pushes her from the cooking world to the global market, all in preparation for her TV chat show next year. The talk show will be produced, in part, by Oprah Winfrey.
Four shows on the Food Network! Eleven best-selling cookbooks! A magazine! A talk show! The wedding! (E! Entertainment recently fawned over her Tuscan wedding and Alicia Mughetti gown.)
Bottom line: If you like Rachael Ray, and plenty of people do, you'll enjoy the magazine. It's stuffed with ideas, information, recipes, tips and her. Save your money if you break out in hives when 30-Minute Meals comes on and she starts in about EVOO (extra-virgin olive oil) and her garbage bowl. Her ever-present smile and can-do earnestness live on every page.
At first flip, Everyday spins a fun vibe. The graphics are bright, photos engaging and recipes sound delicious and do-able. A group of "real cooks" from across the country will regularly provide cooking and shopping suggestions. We like that.
There's a recipe index in the front, though no nutritional information with recipes. Step-by-step photos are helpful and a color photo accompanies each of the 74 recipes. Everyday seems to be aimed at a young audience, one with no time to read and well used to the jumpy editing of music videos.
After a more studied look, we longed for something visually soothing. Perhaps the type-heavy pages of Gourmet? Or a cloudless sky.
Honestly, Everyday is too much. There are more than 30 articles, really more like items, ranging from kitchen mishaps, a peek inside Whoopi Goldberg's fridge, how to buy cheese, what makes Jell-O jiggle, Indian cooking for busy moms, Mexican soup, Christmas pasta, no-stress holiday entertaining and so on.
(Of special note for Tampa Bay readers is artist Lynn Pauley's tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Columbia Restaurant.)
The magazine reads like the notes from a brainstorming meeting where no one was brave enough to throw any ideas away. There is enough material here for an entire year's worth of magazines.
That doesn't make us want to cook. It makes us want to nap.
Janet K. Keeler can be reached at 727 893-8586 or krieta@sptimes.com
Want it?Everyday with Rachael Ray is $3.99 an issue or $18 for a 1-year six issues subscription. For more information, go to www.everydaywithrachaelray.com