Ruth Reichl Recharges in the Kitchen.
Ruth Reichl was in the kitchen she designed as both command center and comfort station, making a salami sandwich for her husband, Michael Singer, 75, a former CBS News producer who has been recovering from back surgery.
“He has this thing from his childhood about salami,” she said, smearing a slice of ciabatta bread with Dijon mustard.
“It’s not a Freudian issue,” he shouted from the Danish-modern kitchen table, where his head was buried in his laptop. “I just like salami.”
This, now, is life for Ms. Reichl. At 67, she is softer, less anxious and, her friends say, a happier version of the cautious workaholic who was the food editor at The Los Angeles Times, the restaurant critic at The New York Times, a best-selling memoirist and, for a decade, the editor of Gourmet, the oldest food and wine magazine in America.
She makes her husband three meals a day when she is not traveling. She writes in a little cabin set a few dozen paces behind the sleek house with glass walls that the couple built 11 years ago here on a shale plateau between the Hudson River and the Berkshires. And she cooks for just about anyone who walks in the door.
“At this point in your life,” she said, “you have to have as much fun as you can because you don’t know what’s coming down the road.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/16/dining/ruth-reichl-my-kitchen-year.html?