Comfort Me with Apples

Wow. If you want to read about food and romance, fuck “[b:Eat, Pray, Love 19501 Eat, Pray, Love Elizabeth Gilbert http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1269870432s/19501.jpg 3352398],” and get your hands on this book. Ruth Reichl is a gifted writer and incredibly knowledgeable about food, so her writing about food is nothing short of sublime, but what really makes the book fantastic is her unstinting honesty about all the messy parts of her personal life (and keen observations about her friends, family, and coworkers) as she moved professionally from a line cook in Berkeley to the food critic for the LA Times. No pun intended, because it's too apt to be funny–this book is juicy. And there's nothing better than a recipe with a little history to it, so it went right on the shelf with my other cookbooks, and I'm already plotting occasions to try recreate some of the food from her life in mine.

Chef to food critic.