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Throwing together dinner and need it done five minutes ago? Food Network’s Rachael Ray has got you covered with the most uncomplicated salad you’ll ever have the pleasure of throwing together.

The Rachael Ray Show star said this recipe is probably her easiest tossed salad yet.

Rachael Ray poses during Food Network's 'In the Kitchen With Rachael Ray' in a sunny yellow sweater, while leaning on her kitchen counter.
Food Network’s Rachael Ray, 2020 | Getty Images/Getty Images for NYCWFF

Ray is all about keeping it simple

The television personality has made it clear that, for her, culinary instruction is meant to be simple. Her Food Network program 30-Minute Meals alone is an illustration of her dedication to keeping meals fun, easy, and delicious.

She told The New York Post that, while she may not be a trained chef, she gets the job done, and is having a great time doing it.

“Food is a wonderful hobby because you’re always learning, every time you eat out, travel or talk to someone in a grocery store,” she said. “I don’t think I’m any more skilled than when I started because a chef is a chef. I would have to go through some serious, hardcore, back-in-the-day cheffy school to really be a master. So there’s a certain skill level I don’t think I’ll ever attain. I’m comfortable chopping onions the way I chop onions.”

Her bacon-maple dressed salad is classy and delicious

In a recent Instagram post, Ray shared her fast and easy Warm Bacon-Maple Dressed Salad recipe, writing “5-minute (or less!) Warm Bacon-Maple Dressed Salad hits all the right notes: savory, sweet, did I mention 🥓!?! – and SUPER FAST”

It’s a practically instant way to make a weeknight salad into a comforting, warm meal with the bacon’s smokiness and the maple syrup’s just-right sweetness. Try it with your favorite greens and serve right away.

Here’s how Ray learned the ropes in the kitchen

The Rachael Ray 50 author doesn’t mind saying that she learned everything she knows from the woman she idolized from a very young age: her mother.

As Ray revealed about her mom in her cookbook Everyone Is Italian on Sunday: “My mom was the eldest of my grandfather’s ten children. You never would have guessed she was the daughter of an immigrant stonemason who had to work eighty or more hours a week while growing and harvesting enough food for so many mouths. My mother’s recollection of her childhood has always been my favorite bedtime story.” 

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“I’m a pale comparison next to her,” Ray told ABC. “My mother worked 100 hours a week, and wouldn’t bat an eyelash. All my life she was iconic to me, she was my first Oprah. … She was like the person I looked at, and I said, ‘Wow.'”

Cooking, for the future television chef, seeped into every part of her life from watching her mother work. Food preparation wasn’t stressful for her; it was energizing and uniting.

“I think that cooking was just a byproduct of the way we lived, and life happened around the food,” she said. “We were always in the kitchen and talking and sharing, and it was just where you had a good time.”

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