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    Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
    Unavailable
    Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
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    Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table
    Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

    Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    In Ruth Reichl's latest book - one that will delight her fans and convert those as yet uninitiated to her charming tales - the author brings to life her adventures in pursuit of good meals and good company. Picking up where Tender at the Bone leaves off, Comfort Me with Apples recounts Reichl's transformation from chef to food writer, a process that led her through restaurants from Bangkok to Paris to Los Angeles and brought lessons in life, love, and food.

    It is an apprenticeship by turns delightful and daunting, one told in the most winning and engaging of voices. Reichl's anecdotes from a summer lunch with M.F.K. Fisher, a mad dash through the produce market with Wolfgang Puck, and a garlic feast with Alice Waters are priceless. She is unafraid - even eager - to poke holes in the pretensions of food critics, making each meal a hilarious and instructive occasion for novices and experts alike. The New York Times has said, "While all good food critics are humorous .. few are so riotously, effortlessly entertaining as Ruth Reichl." In Comfort Me with Apples, Reichl once again demonstrates her inimitable ability to combine food writing, humor, and memoir into an art form.


    From the Hardcover edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 10, 2001
    ISBN9780739300053
    Unavailable
    Comfort Me with Apples: More Adventures at the Table

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    Reviews for Comfort Me with Apples

    4/5

    475 ratings26 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Sometimes you find a book that surprises you totally! A very wonderful memoir full of recipes that cry out to be taken seriously. I want to try page 255 for certain. Danny Kaye's pasta.
    • 4/5
      A very enjoyable read. I suppose this could be considered one of those memoirs where the author fesses up to all their dirty laundry, but it didn't feel like that. It felt like a woman trying to sort through her experiences in life to understand them. This writer ran in the circles of the cooking avant garde of the 1970s and since then in America. She was a restaurant critic, food journalist and editor of Gourmet magazine for ten years. More than that, she loves food, the act of cooking and the experience of eating. In addition to all the rock star chefs she knew, she became friends with Danny Kaye while she was in L.A., being invited to his home more than once for his special meals. I didn't know he loved to cook. I adore that of all the Hollywood celebrities she may have met, he was the one she was thrilled to know. I have another book by this author and I will be happy to read it. She includes recipes at the end of each chapter, some of which I may try.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book as mucch as her first one "Tender to the Bone". I really cared what happened to her while I was reading it and I LOVED the ending.
    • 3/5
      I will say this for Reichl--the lady has guts. As she recounts a period of her life when she bounced from one infidelity to the next, with stops along the way for self-indulgent six-hour meals that made my stomach hurt just reading about them, I found myself simply feeling sorry for the two men she was torn between. Then a child became involved, and, oh my goodness. Never have I read a memoir in which the writer/narrator made herself into such a blatantly unsympathetic character. (See my full review at Worducopia
    • 4/5
      I love her descriptions of her food experiences.
    • 5/5
      I love Reichl's writing, and I did love this book.It picks up where her "Tender at the Bone" left off, and was breathtakingly honest about some complicated real life issues.And with recipes!My only quibble is that the recipes are not referenced anywhere; today I paged through the book and made my own index. I want to try cooking about half of them...A fascinating memoir, with intriguing recipes I want to cook.
    • 4/5
      Funny and poignant memoir of the famous food critic.
    • 3/5
      Reichl writes Soooo well, you can practically taste the food. But her behavior was terrible and I nearly stopped because I couldn't like or believe in her. Ultimately I'm glad I finished, and I will read more from her.
    • 3/5
      Cooking, food, wine, travel, life, and sex
    • 3/5
      There's a lot of soap opera in this memoir. I was enchanted by "Tender at the Bone", but with this one I kept shaking my head, saying, "Ruth! Get it together!" Not that we all haven't had periods in our life like that, but still. I found this book draining while her first memoir was enriching.

      I'm going to try the Swiss Pumpkin recipe, though.
    • 4/5
      I'm not a cook by any stretch of the imagination, but for some reason I find Reichl's critiques of food around the world (Thailand, Paris, China, NYC, LA, Barcelona), and her recipes, all so fascinating. I enjoyed Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table awhile back, and this is its sequel. About 3/4 of the way through, it occurred to me that that this is what Eat, Pray, Love could have been with a good writer and interesting storyline. At one point Reichl tells her editor, "Haven't you noticed that food all by itself is really boring to read about? It's everything around the food that makes it interesting. The sociology. The politics. The history." That's how Reichl does it. But it's not just about food -- we also accompany her through a reluctant divorce, a new husband, aging parents, struggles with getting pregnant -- and at no point does this feel like a dull piece of non-fiction. It's full of wit, charm, and intelligence
    • 4/5
      This wasn't quite what I expected…but not in a bad way. I thought this would be a collection of reminiscences about meals eaten. It's true that she does, sometimes, discuss meals she had at certain times in her life, and she provides recipes for some of her favorites. However, this is really just a memoir about her life during the period when she was becoming established as a restaurant critic: how and where she lived, her marriages and affairs, her efforts to establish her voice. She's an interesting individual who writes well and that makes this an interesting book.
    • 4/5
      Such an easy read, and I mean that as a compliment! I picked this second (apparently) memoir by restaurant critic Ruth Reichl and sped through it over two days. Entertaining for foodies, people searching for their true calling, travel junkies, and pretty much anybody. An added bonus is the inclusion of recipes at the end of each chapter. Very smoothly inclusive and not at all interruptive to the flow of the "story".
    • 2/5
      Basically, this sequel is not nearly as good as "Tender at the Bone." This plot revolves around Reichl's terribly indecision/poor decisions concerning love and sex. The food's in there too, but it's not as integrated into the story. It's almost as if she's retelling all the selfish decisions she made during her marriage and what food she tasted along the way. Not nearly as compelling as "Tender at the Bone," just skip it, I say. It gets two stars because it's decently written and mildly entertaining at parts.
    • 5/5
      The sun was just rising over the mountains that stood like monuments over the Valley of the Dead, silhouetting date palms in the distance and painting the lazy Nile gold. Elizabeth used her tee shirt to wipe her eyes. What made Brian pick this place for their vacation? Valley of the Dead, for God’s sake. She turned abruptly and walked back to the hotel. The three flash fiction pieces in this small collection tell the separate stories of three women, who for very different reasons, find themselves in Luxor, Egypt, reexamining who they are and why in the world they are here in this ancient, dusty, mysterious land. Elizabeth is one of them. She and her husband, Brian, have just lost a child.
    • 5/5
      This book is a sequel to Reichl's What's Bred in the Bone and covers the disintegration of her first marriage, the marriage to her second husband and her move from San Francisco to Los Angeles when she became the food critic for the LA Times. Written in a breezy, yet honest style Reichl weaves her love of food and cooking throughout her tale of loves found and lost and a harrowing experience in trying to adopt a child. Anyone who loves food, loves life & misses Gourmetmagazine each and every month when it fails to appear in the mailbox will love this book.
    • 4/5
      I have not read any of Reichl's other work (her restaurant reviews, or Tender at the Bone) and picked this book up for the title alone, which simply struck my fancy at a library book sale on a warm summer day. The phrase 'comfort me with apples' conjured up delicious recipes (and there are several included!) as well as Eve in the garden (moments of temptation, choice-making, and inner turmoil are represented too) and finally the notion of 'comfort reading'... and this book was an excellent choice for it. Reichl bares her heart with grace and honesty, sharing things that other writers might be tempted to hide; she never seems fixated on making herself look good, or justifying her choices. Instead, she tells a personal tale in a way that entertains the reader as well as humanizes each other character. Plus the descriptions of food are absolutely crave-inducing. I will go shopping for dinner later with a heightened awareness of my own heart, and the hearts of those I want to know, reach, comfort and feed. Very, very readable.
    • 3/5
      Entertaining, but falls short of Tender at the Bone. Like others, I did find some of it rather self indulgent (although that certainly could not be said of the moving adoption section).
    • 5/5
      I have to admit that when this book was chosen for my book club discussion, I wasn't too thrilled. I did not think I would like it much, but I was pleasantly surprised! Reichl writes with such simple elegance and candor that it is hard not to love every word she pens. Although this is technically a sequel, I did not feel lost having not read the prequel. Describing her life during her years as a restaurant critic, this book is peppered with a good deal of "shop talk" (if you will), but when the shop talk is about food, I have no problems with that! You will be probably be hungry while reading this book though, or yearn for something more exotic on your dinner table after reading Reichl's mouth-watering descriptions of the delectable meals she consumes as she travels from California to Paris to China to Barcelona and back again.
    • 4/5
      Ruth Reichl's food and life memoir takes up where the story of her early life, Tender at the Bone left off. Her developing career, communal life and relationship dramas are peppered (punny no?) with accessible recipes throughout. Her visit to a China struggling to open to the west was particularly insightful. Her quest to become a mother was both joyful and heartbreaking. The title was taken from the Song of Solomon and the book is enough to make you want to look up the verse in the OT and bestow an apple cobbler on your best pal. Readers will eagerly long to join Reichl's friend list to tag along on a food adventure.
    • 2/5
      Comfort Me with Apples is a memoir written by Ruth Reichl, a well-known restaurant critic, with a few recipes thrown in. Reichl was once a chef and this book covers her transition from cooking food to writing about it for a living.

      As with most of the best food writing, Comfort Me with Apples shows how good food is intertwined with your life experiences rather than separate from them. There is so much focus on diets these days that it was nice to read a book about people who love food and never mention calories. Reichl doesn't color events to make herself look good, either. She makes the reader laugh and cry with her over the mistakes she's made at work and in her life.

      The only quibble I have with this book is that if feels like it is actually a section pulled out of the middle of a larger tome. I know that Reichl wrote another memoir before this one (Tender at the Bone) and after this one (Garlic and Sapphires), which gives this one an abrupt beginning and end. It didn't take me too long to fall into the flow of things so this is a minor quibble.

      Overall, I would recommend this book. It is short and the narrative flows quickly. That makes it perfect reading for waiting in queues and doctor's offices.
    • 5/5
      I loved this book as mucch as her first one "Tender to the Bone". I really cared what happened to her while I was reading it and I LOVED the ending.
    • 1/5
      Self-indulgent biography with little insight and very little to redeem it; the polar opposite of Reichl's first foray, Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table
    • 5/5
      Further adventures and twists in the life of Ruth Reichl, a gifted cook, writer and restaurant critic. This part covers the early middle age of her life. It was interesting and entertaining to once again peek into lives of people obsessed with food. The recipes look very good- I have to try out a few.I really enjoyed the description of her and a few other chefs and journalists’ trip to China at the beginning of the seventies, where everybody on both sides was treated like an exotic animal.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book -- this and Tender at the Bone are two of my favorite memoirs ever.
    • 3/5
      The sequel to "Tender at the Bone" by Ruth Reichl, this is subtitled "more adventures at the table". However the adventures are by means restricted to the table, many of them take place in the book is just as much about Reichl's love life as it is about her love for food. This doesn't make it any less interesting (unless you're only interested in food), but for someone who seems to have made some impetuous decisions in regard to men, she manages to come out relatively unscathed at the end. Some of her downs admittedly were very challenging (losing a child, marriage to her first love breaking up) but despite it she survives through what can only be described as having the good luck to live a charmed life (or maybe I’m just jealous!) This book didn't have the charm of the first one for me. I found her character less sympathetic, perhaps because more self-engrossed in an annoying way - ok I know she started moving in celebrity circles as her career picked up in this book, but I got a little tired of the name dropping. The food descriptions were, as before, brilliant, even if I shuddered at some of the things she was brave enough to eat (very suspect in the case of her visit to China). An engrossing read nevertheless and I'm looking forward to reading the next one.