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On what folks can expect at this year's festival: Cocktails! "We're actually taking a break from cooking at this event and instead we will have three bartenders from Truck continuously squeezing fresh Persian limes and hand-shaking our signature margarita, 'The Powerwagon.'"
On what inspires her: Great ingredients. "Right now the weather's changing, two weeks ago, we couldn't imagine cooking winter squash, but when we had a blast of crisp autumn air, we turned to roasting crescent shapes of delicata, and baking spaghetti, and red kuri squashes."
On what she's cooking now: "I have a lot of potatoes from my garden so I'm doing mashed, or boiled (squooshed with a fork) with a lump of good cultured butter, Maldon salt, freshly ground black pepper and topped with chopped parsley, fall chives--I've got a tiny bit of basil left."
She's also a fan of beans and salads. "This year was a great year for green, wax, purple and Roman beans, I usually just blanche them. We cook a lot of great dried beans at the restaurant.
I also like to make variations of the chopped salad we do at TRUCK using a different bean, different salad greens, different cheeses (crumbling triple cremes, or roquefort-types, or goat cheese), ripe sun gold tomatoes, halved, bit of some type of onion-chopped scallion, or torpedo reds.
If we have leftover cold chicken or fish, or even a cold rare hamburger I'll toss that in. A ripe avocado, tossed with good olive oil and lemon juice makes a great dressing. Any fresh green herb from the garden gets tossed in as well."
On what she loves to cook: "I have a weakness for cookies; my quickest recipe is a brown sugar shortbread which gets better as it ages and is heaven with a cup of Earl Grey tea."
The Greenwich WINE + FOOD Festival runs Sept. 23-26; go to www.greenwichwineandfood.com/ for more information.
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