You Are What You Eat, Ruth Reichl

photo by Brigitte LacombeName: Ruth Reichl

Occupation: Editor-in-chief, Gourmet Magazine

Borough: Manhattan

Relationship status: Married

What did you eat today?

Breakfast: roasted apricots (leftover from dessert last night) with sliced organic strawberries and heavy cream

All Day (in the Gourmet Test Kitchens):
Grilled grass-fed beef from a new producer (for an article that Deborah Madison is doing for us).
Oysters in artichoke hearts with spinach in a champagne-cream sauce (for a winter issue)
Cheese-potato crepes with red cabbage and apple salad (another winter issue)
Steak with anchovy butter (late fall)
Almond cake with blackberries (next Spring)
Beef stew (a reader recipe)
Hamburgers (more of that grass fed beef)
Bitter greens salad with feta (next summer)
Chocolate truffles (sent into the magazine by the producer)
A handful of cherries (brought from home)

Dinner at home with the family:
Roast chicken (organic, free-range, from a local farmer) with roasted potatoes, onions and garlic
Local Asparagus with balsamic vinegar
Sautéed mushrooms with sherry
Sautéed lacinata kale with onions
Vanilla ice cream with sliced strawberries

What do you never eat?

Honey. Loathe the stuff. Don’t have much love for sweet wines either.

Complete this sentence: In my refrigerator, you can always find:

Butter
Free-range eggs
Parmesan cheese
Lemons
Sriracha sauce
3 or 4 other kinds of hot sauce
Hoisin sauce
Oyster sauce
Good maple syrup
Tortillas
Cold water
Tiptree’s Little Scarlet jam
Milk
Sour cream
White wine

And in the freezer:
Homemade chicken stock
Vanilla ice cream
Spicy pork sausages
Wild blueberries
Frozen dumplings from the 5 for $1 dumpling place in Chinatown
Schapira’s Viennese roast coffee

What is your favorite kitchen item?

My new black granite mortar and pestle – perfect for making salad dressing (among other things).

Where do you eat out most frequently?

Pearl Oyster Bar. I could happily eat steamed clams every day. And their little boiled lobsters are perfect. And I love the way it feels in there.

World ends tomorrow. What would you like for your last meal?

A loaf of great crusty bread with cold sweet butter
2 dozen little neck clams on the half shell
a well-aged, rare Porterhouse steak bone to gnaw on
just-picked Silver Queen corn on the cob
sliced home-grown tomatoes with great olive oil and good sherry vinegar
a bottle of 1982 Petrus
1 perfectly ripe peach

[Let's hope the world ends during the month of August. -- Ed.]

My Pau always got the L.A. Times on Thursdays and Sundays because that was when it came with the food sections -- and all of his precious coupons and flyers. Often, the food articles that really made my mouth water had Ruth Reichl's byline. Then I'd read the Sunday magazine and in the back, there'd be a great recipe article, again with Ruth Reichl's byline. She was the first journalist I ever learned to look for by name. Who is this Ruth Reichl, and how does she know so much about food? I thought. I imagined she looked like Dr. Ruth, because Dr. Ruth was the only other Ruth I'd ever heard of, and I wasn't very imaginative.

I love her books (the most recent being Garlic and Sapphires, again published by my employer) and I'm totally in awe of her body of work. Honest to goodness, she's one of my rock stars. To quote my friend Robert, "You don't understand! I'm like a 50 year-old gay man meeting Liza Minnelli!"