‘My Kitchen Year’ cookbook and diary proves cathartic for Ruth Reichl

My Kitchen Year by Ruth Riechl
(Photo from Penguin Random House website)

TORONTO—Ruth Reichl finds inspiration everywhere for her food journey.

She spends endless hours browsing the wares of emporiums in her native New York, visiting farmers markets near her upstate country home and tasting the offerings from chefs at restaurants and food trucks during frequent travels.

And she’s not shy about peeking into the carts of other shoppers at the grocery store.

Even though she’s been involved with food for decades as a writer, restaurant critic, editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine and television host and judge, the 67-year-old says she’s still learning.

“Every time you go to the store it’s a chance to learn something new, to meet new people, and sometimes it’s the butcher or the cheesemonger or the farmer and sometimes it’s just the person who is standing next to you in the supermarket picking up some ingredient and you go, ‘What are you going to do with that kohlrabi?'” she says during a visit to Toronto.

“I’ll turn around and say, ‘Do you have some recipe? This is an interesting pile of ingredients you’ve got there. What are you going to do with that?'”

Her food journey took a dark turn when Gourmet was abruptly shuttered in 2009 and she found herself at loose ends after 10 years at the magazine’s helm. “My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life” (Appetite by Random House), part diary, part cookbook, was conceived in the aftermath.

She describes her vulnerability and slow process of healing as she rediscovered the importance cooking holds for her.

Each recipe is anchored by a poetic tweet Reichl sent out the day she made it, offering a clue of her emotional state—like “Gourmet’s over. What now?”

The recipes are wide-ranging, from a decadent chocolate cake “that cures everything,” to a tempting grilled cheese sandwich to celebrate the wonder of watching a moose ambling about on her country property, and a comforting curry-flavoured yogurt-cloaked chicken.

Reichl says she loves everything about the physical act of cooking, including shopping and even doing the dishes.

Reichl has seen a huge renaissance in food since the 1970s.

“I could never in a million years have imagined when I started writing about food that we would be at the place that we are now. I do travel a lot and it’s a rare town that doesn’t have a farmers’ market,” she says.

“Certainly the whole notion of ethical eating has come front and centre, right to all of our tables in a way that was really unimaginable even 15 years ago.”

Reichl hopes “My Kitchen Year” will inspire people to derive the same pleasure from cooking that she does.

“I really feel that we in the media have a lot to answer for in the way we frighten people away from cooking,” Reichl says, adding Gourmet staff was mindful of that.

“But I think one of the things we did was make people feel like if you can’t cook at this very high level, if you’re not a chef, then don’t even bother. And so I really wanted to write a book that would say to people: cooking is easy, it’s fun, it is a wonderful meditation. And we’re talking about a meal, it’s not a test.”

Reichl, who’s working on a novel and a Gourmet memoir, also hopes people will learn they needn’t be defined by their jobs.

“I’d always been ‘Ruth Reichl comma editor, restaurant critic, whatever,’ and when I was suddenly ‘Ruth Reichl blank,’ that’s how I felt … blank.”

“At the end of this year it was ‘Oh, just being Ruth Reichl is fine. I don’t have to be ”Ruth Reichl comma anything.”‘ I learned that in the kitchen. I found my core again. To me the secret of life is learning to find joy in the everyday. For me, that’s very much in the kitchen.”