In This ArticleView AllIn This Article1. Rach’s Buffalo Chicken Chili2. Curtis Stone’s Orange Bostock3. Rach’s Chipotle Sweet Potato & Chorizo Quesadillas4. Rach’s Pretzel-Crusted Chicken5. Scott Conant’s Cranberry Campari Compote6. Rach’s Sticky Chicken Tray Bake7. Katie Lee Biegel’s Logan County Hamburgers
In This ArticleView All
View All
In This Article
Rach’s Buffalo Chicken Chili
Curtis Stone’s Orange Bostock
Rach’s Chipotle Sweet Potato & Chorizo Quesadillas
Rach’s Pretzel-Crusted Chicken
Scott Conant’s Cranberry Campari Compote
Rach’s Sticky Chicken Tray Bake
Katie Lee Biegel’s Logan County Hamburgers
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Photo: Clifton Prescod
A career in television is sparkly. It’s the kind of job that people know about before you walk into a room. “Oh yea, I’ve heard your name before, you’re the girl who works for Rachael Ray! What’s she like?!” preceded me for the better part of the last 16 years.
Yep, that’s me, Jeanette, often referred to as Rach’s resident toast maker (she always burned the bread, so I could often be seen on the show running through her kitchen delivering her perfectly toasted buns) or the watermelon queen (every summer for the better part of 10 years or so, I carved a watermelon into a fun creature on the show).
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And people always asked, “What is Rachael like?” She is freaking amazing. Generous, prolific, smart, sharp, creative, inspiring, supportive. I’ve always said she’s on this earth doing exactly what she was meant to be doing; sharing her talents, tips, palpable smiles and delicious food with the masses—and I had a daily front-row seat to it.
Jennifer Bagwell
I started with the show as an intern in 2007, as a biology major who lived in a Manhattan apartment across the street from the old studio. (Spoiler alert, this biologist never made it to grad school.) A classmate was in the final weeks of her internship and encouraged me to apply, given my love for all things food and fast-paced fun. I got the gig and never looked back.
I did a lot of different jobs in my tenure there. I started as an intern and left 16 years later an Emmy-award-winning producer. From procuring lint from dryers across the city’s laundromats for a segment about laundry, to pulling together recipes on the fly in the walk-in fridge with Chef Jacques Pépin, to calming the nerves of both unknown and very well-known guests who were about to cook their recipes standing next totheRachael Ray, to being a guest on the show with my own recipes … I wore a lot of hats.
That was the best part of the job; every day was different. I met incredible guests and worked with some of my best friends who, as cliché as it sounds, have become members of my family. And, together, we changed the way people viewed food and made some fantastic television.
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Although I never made it to grad school, I consider myself to have a master’s degree from the school of RR. Turns out working alongside Culinary Institute of America-trained chefs, an über-talented host and world-renowned chefs on the daily both on set and in the prep kitchen is the quickest and best way to learn how to cook, make food look pretty and eat well too.
As you can imagine, we ate a lot (like … a lot, a lot) of great food. From family-meal lunches to leftovers behind the scenes, we got to experience it all. Here are my favorite seven recipes that I ate while working on the show. All of these are in my repertoire, as are many others, but, sometimes you have to pick your favorite child (or in this case, children), right?!
Had to start with the greatest of all time,Rach’s Buffalo Chicken Chili. I think this recipe broke our website a number of times. Anything we aired with “Buffalo” in the title always did. (We once did an entire Thanksgiving meal that was Buffalo- and ranch-inspired, but that’s a story for another day.) This one makes my list because it, in my opinion, is the epitome of a recipe that was our bread and butter; it’s simple, it’s delicious, it’s quick and it’s BUFFALO. I don’t particularly care about football, but I religiously make this on Sundays in the fall. I always double- or triple-batch it because it’s a great dish to have in the freezer for another night when you can’t figure out what to cook.
This recipewas just a normal “what’s for dinner tonight” as we called them, but something about the combination of chipotle-lime sweet potatoes and chorizo all mashed together into aquesadillamakes this recipe a 10. I particularly remember this being made on one of those very busy show days (we used to film three full episodes in one day), and I hadn’t eaten for hours. One of my teammates saved me a piece, and I’ve been making them on steady rotation ever since.
Another Rach recipethat is in the greatest-of-all-time category. I’m not sure why no one thought about coating chicken tenders in crushed-uppretzelsbefore, but I’m glad she did. I can vividly remember her teaching Jessica Simpson how to whisk cheese into the dipping sauce in a figure 8. For some reason I make it every New Year’s Eve, I don’t know why, but I don’t question it. It works for any occasion, really.
Bookmark this one for Thanksgiving. Scotty was a good friend of the show (my former boss Emily went to culinary school with him, so we all adopted the nickname Scotty). The team was always buzzing when the chef andChoppedjudge came around.This compoteis a blend of two of my favorite things, Thanksgiving and anegroni. It’s a flawless recipe, and your holiday guests will buzz for it too.
Part of our job was to know what was going on with food trends. Did I mention we were putting food in a waffle maker decades before all the cool kids were doing it on TikTok? Tray bakes came on the scene, and now I’m wondering how we ever lived without them. Much like the term “Buffalo,” tray bakes would also rate very well for us.This tray bakeis the one I make most at home. Rach’s sticky chicken glaze is a recipe from a few years ago, but recently she revamped it to be a tray bake and it’s as simple as it is delicious.
TheRachael Ray Showfilmed its last episode in March. The crazy part about spending almost 16 years of your life at one job is that a lot happens. My team and I have seen each other through some of the worst days and some of the best days of our lives. In that time, I moved in with my boyfriend, got engaged to the boyfriend, got married and had two beautiful children. I still don’t quite understand what my life will look like without theRachael Ray Showas my home base. The friendships will be there forever. And when I’m missing my time there, I’m grateful to forever have the smells, flavors and tastes of the place that will always feel like home.
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