We are living in unprecedented times. Most of us are stuck at home involuntarily, trying to cope the best we can.
In 2009, Ruth Reichl found herself in a similar situation. She had been the editor of Gourmet magazine for ten years and was in Seattle doing publicity for a new cookbook the magazine had just published when she received a mysterious call from her boss. “You need to return to New York right away,” he said. He refused to tell her why. In a staff meeting the next morning, all the employees were told that the magazine would stop publishing immediately. They were fired.
At the age of 61, Ruth feared she would never get another job and worried how she would support her family. Stuck at home, she began to cook. In the next year, cooking would be her salvation, healing her wounds and providing her with a new source of income when she turned that year of cooking into a cookbook and memoir called My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life. We have this book in our digital collection as a Cloud Library e-book. She also has a famous Twitter feed with over a million followers. Her short poetic tweets are scattered throughout her book.
Ruth is a very engaging writer and many of the recipes in this book use only a few ingredients and are fairly simple to make. I found it soothing to follow along as someone else dealt with being at home unexpectedly (albeit with trips to the farmers market that are not possible for me right now). I’m planting Broccoli Raab in my garden this week and I’m hoping to try her recipe for Broccoli Raab Bruschetta in a couple of months.
After My Kitchen Year, she wrote a memoir of her years at Gourmet magazine titled Save Me the Plums – we have Save Me the Plums in our digital collection as both an e-book and an e-audiobook. We also have Tender at the Bone, a memoir of her early life, as an e-book and Delicious, a novel she wrote, as an e-book.