The actress and cookbook author Ayesha Curry fell in love with food at age 12. “Most kids were watching cartoons, I was watching Food Network,” she laughs. She credits some of the biggest names in the culinary world for her teaching her how to cook (through her TV screen, of course): Emeril, Rachael Ray, Giada De Laurentiis, Julia Childs, to name a few. But she never realized that she could turn her own passion into a career.