Forbes' Top Ten Celebrity Chefs

Rachael Ray began winning audiences with catch phrases like "EVOO" (for extra-virgin olive oil) on her first Food Network show, 30 Minute Meals, in 2001. Today, she has four Food Network programs, including Tasty Travels and $40 a Day. Her nationally syndicated, Oprah-backed talk show, Rachael Ray, is averaging 2.6 million viewers this season, and her Every Day With Rachael Ray magazine has 1.5 million readers. She endorses Dunkin' Donuts too--all to the tune of $18 million a year.


More established chefs also know how to play her game. Wolfgang Puck pulls in $16 million a year. The Austrian-born patriarch of celebrity chefdom got his start with the ritzy Los Angeles restaurant Spago in 1982. That hot spot, once frequented by Orson Welles and Sidney Poitier, now counts Brad Pitt and Jamie Foxx among its regulars. Today Puck owns 15 other fine-dining brands, including Chinois, Cut and the Source, and he also sells sandwiches to weary airport travelers at Wolfgang Puck Express. He's got Wolfgang Puck Bistros in suburbia and sells soups in the grocery aisle and cutlery on the Home Shopping Network.

Other top ten celebrity chefs include:

#3-Gordon Ramsay ($7.5 million), #4-Nobuyuke Matsuhisa ($5 million0, #5-Alain Ducasse ($5 million), #6-Paula Deen ($4.5 million), #7-Mario Batali ($3 million), #8-Tom Colicchio ($2 million), #9-Bobby Flay ($1.5 Million) and 310-Anthony Bourdian ($1.5 million).

Ducasse's empire includes 22 restaurants from Tokyo to Paris. The French chef's first New York spot shuttered in 2006 after critics said the food was too fussy; he opened two humbler joints there this year.

Deen, the queen of Southern cuisine, serves up butter-drenched casseroles and motherly charm on two Food Network shows. Her loyal audience laps it up, and her cookbooks, memoir and magazine are all bestsellers.

And Batali, a culinary school dropout, is now a master of Italian cuisine who owns 13 restaurants in New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Reservations at his New York spots Babbo and Del Posto are especially hard to get.

Branded television shows play a big role in the success of many of the chefs on the Forbes list.

Anthony Bourdain's Travel Channel show, No Reservations, where he explores delights like roasted warthog rectum, has become the network's top hit. The Food Network's female fans swoon over Bobby Flay's Southwestern cooking. He hosts Throwdown!, Boy Meets Grill and The Next Food Network Star. And Tom Colicchio is a judge on Bravo's Top Chef cooking competition.

But none can beat Ray's network gig. Her 2.6 million viewers undoubtedly think it's Yum-O.

Source: Forbes

Wealthiest Members of Congress

Facing election-year pressure to keep a lid on their salaries, lawmakers in Congress quietly agreed last week not to increase their pay next year. As a result, most members of Congress will earn $174,000 in 2011, the same amount they're getting this year.

But for some members of Congress -- including John Kerry, Dianne Feinstein, Jared Polis and Frank Lautenberg --that $174,000 might seem like chump change. Fourty-four percent of members are millionaires, compared to a much smaller percentage of other Americans. Senators had a median reportable net worth of $1.79 million in 2008, the last year such data were available. House members' median net worth was $645,503.

So, just who are the wealthiest members of Congress? The website rollcall.com, the Capitol Hill newspaper, releases an annual report on this very topic, the most recent released in 2009. Based on 2008 disclosures, here are the 10 wealthiest.

1.  Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass) - $167 Million

2.  Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif)  - $164 Million

3.  Rep. Jane Harmen (D-Calif) - $112 Million

4.  Sen. Jay Rockerfeller (D-W. Va.) - $80 Million

5.  Sen. Mark Warner (D- Va.) - $72 Million

6. Rep. Jared Polis (D-Col) - $71 Million

7. Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-Fla) - $49 Million

8.  Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N. J.) - $48 Million

9.  Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) $42 Million

10. Rep. Harry Teague (D-N. M) - $40 Million

To take a look at the 50 wealthiest members of Congress, their assets, liabilities, gains and losses 2007 to 2008, and other financial data, visit Roll Call and CQ Politics at the link below.

http://www.rollcall.com/features/Guide-to-Congress_2009/guide/38181-1.html?gclid=CJ62jK2HzaECFQtSgwodfXSecQ&page=1

Source: MSN; Roll Call; CQ Politics

Lena Horne Dies

Lena Horne, who died on May 9 aged 92, was a singer, actress, civil rights activist and, eventually, a show business phenomenon, after a career spanning more than 70 years.


Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born in a small Jewish hospital in Brooklyn, New York, on June 30 1917. That summer saw 10,000 blacks marching down Fifth Avenue in protest against lynchings in the South .

Her father, Teddy (said to have connections with the gangster Dutch Schultz), walked out on his wife and child in 1920. Lena’s mother, Edna, moved to Harlem, where she joined the Lafayette Stock Company, a theatrical touring group promoting black artists, among them Paul Robeson.

Lena, meanwhile, was sent to live with her grandmother, Cora, a formidable matriarch and feminist known as “The Tiny Terror”. A disciplinarian, she insisted that her charge spoke “properly” and never used slang. Lena was sent to a private kindergarten, at which she was the only “colored” pupil. She often played with the children of Swedish immigrants, but was strictly forbidden to mix with the tenement Irish, who were frowned upon by middle-class blacks.

Later her mother retrieved her child and moved to Miami, where Lena’s schoolfriends made fun of her accent and her skin color, calling her a “little yellow bastard”.

In 1934 Lena was hired as a dancer at the Cotton Club in Harlem, the most famous speakeasy in New York.

During her long career, she toured internationally, appearing several times at the London Palladium and the London Casino. She also recorded many albums, ranging from jazz and blues to Rodgers and Hart songs such as The Lady is a Tramp. Altogether she appeared in some 15 films, among them I Dood It (1943) and Ziegfeld Follies (1946). The last, Death of a Gunfighter, came out in 1969, after which she retired to Los Angeles to grow cacti.

In 1981 she returned to Broadway in a one-woman show, A Lady and her Music, which ran for two and a half years and for which she won a Tony Award.

Lena Horne had a son and a daughter by her first marriage. Her son predeceased her.

Couple Number One - Wedding

Enjoy the video of my son, Kreighton Green, and his wife, Janel Homes Green, as they take their wedding vows in Negril, Jamaica, West Indies.

Follow Kreighton in his Las Vegas eNVy blog:

Las Vegas eNVy by Kreighton Lamar Green

Benjamin Hooks Dies

Benjamin Hooks

Benjamin L. Hooks, a civil rights leader who led the NAACP from 1977 to 1992, has died. Hooks was "a vocal campaigner for civil rights in the United States," said the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

Born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1925, Hooks grew up in the segregated South.
Hooks served in the U.S. Army during World War II, where he "found himself in the humiliating position of guarding Italian prisoners of war who were allowed to eat in restaurants that were off limits to him. The experience helped to deepen his resolve to do something about bigotry in the South," according to a biography published by the University of Memphis, where he was a professor in the political science department.

Civil Rights Matriarch Dies

Dorothy Height (2002)

Dorothy Height, a leading civil rights pioneer of the 1960s, has died at age 98.

Height, who had been chair and president emerita of the National Council of Negro Women, worked in the 1960s alongside civil rights pioneers, including the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., future U.S. Rep. John Lewis and A. Philip Randolph. She was on the platform when King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech at the 1963 March on Washington.

A "Bit" About Me-Part 1

Life on Chicago's West side prepares you for anything. Couple that with the discipline and regimentation of Catholic elementary and all girls high school and you have all the makings of a driven Type A personality. Born to be "in charge", I spent my work life climbing the corporate ladder and breaking the "glass ceiling". My reward is retirement, living comfortably in Sin City. My partner of four decades keeps me on the right track and makes life worth living. I leave my gifts to the world, my three wonderful children and four promising grandchildren. We all say "Yes, we can!"