Nearly three weeks after food-world royalty Ruth Reichl got the staggering news that Gourmet, the venerated culinary magazine she ushered into the 21st century, was shutting down after a 68-year run, she was still at a loss as to what she might do next.

Would she consider returning to the punishing work of reviewing restaurants? As a critic for The New York Times and before that The Los Angeles Times, she sometimes ate at a place nine times before doling out stars -- or relieving a stalwart of stars it no longer deserved.

``Unlikely,'' says Reichl, who speaks about ``The New Culinary Landscape'' at Miami Book Fair International on Monday night. ``I was a critic for 20 something years. I don't have anything to learn from that anymore.''

For Reichl, editor of Gourmet for 10 years, Conde Nast's unexpected announcement a month ago that it was pulling the plug on the magazine came at an especially awkward time. She had just hit the road to promote Gourmet Today (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $40), an epic cookbook she edited, and was 10 days away from the premiere of Gourmet's Adventures with Ruth, a public television series in which she runs around the globe with foodie and actor friends, getting hands dirty at far-flung cooking schools. (It airs at 3 p.m. Saturdays on WPBT-PBS 2.)

``The TV show is going forward,'' Reichl, 61, says from her home in New York. ``We have a couple of other books which will go forward. I probably will be involved. At the moment I'm still with the company, but I'm kind of figuring out what I'm going to do next. I'm still in shock.''

She wasn't the only one taken aback by the news.

``It's the center of gravity, a major planet that's just disappearing,'' chef-author Anthony Bourdain told the Associated Press. ``There's been a lot of speculation about this happening, but I'm still stunned.''

``It's absolutely horrible,'' says Diane Friedberg of Miami Beach, a retired hotel executive. ``I started my subscription in 1965, when I first got married. And I have cooked one or two recipes from every issue since. Every time I have gone abroad I have checked out the places they have recommended and they have been right on every time. It's as if The New Yorker stopped publishing.''

Reichl says that though Gourmet's circulation was at an all-time high with more than a million subscribers, advertising revenue had fallen off considerably in the recession.

``But I was totally surprised. I felt that things would come back and that the company would stick it out.''

Reichl made her name in the book world with four bestselling memoirs that explore her relationship with the culinary world, with love and with the mother she didn't want to become. Her focus on this book tour is Gourmet Today, a 1,000-page tome that brims with fresh, often down-to-earth recipes and enlightening tips: when to use fresh pasta and when to use dried, the differences between antibiotic-free, certified organic and free-range chicken, why wooden skewers are better than metal ones.

The cookbook's more than 1,000 recipes use a global palette of ingredients. Paying attention to the times, it offers lighter, quicker-to-prepare, more sustainability-conscious dishes.

``None of it duplicates the old Gourmet cookbook,'' Reichl says. ``And we went out of our way to put in everything we that we knew and thought would be helpful to people. How to buy vegetables. How to store them. How to quick-soak beans.

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