Market Faces

This is our second in a series of occaisional visits with familiar faces from the Market... Many of you know volunteer Cathy Wintermyer (seen here, left, with another Market staple, Cynthia Robinson). She can usually be found at the Market offering samples of delicious cheese, discussing the best ways to use our herb mixes or giving information and tips to visitors. Cathy is also a member of the Market Steering Committee and plans fundraising and social events for us. I posed our ten questions to Cathy, and she was good enough to send a speedy response!

Ten Questions for Cathy Wintermyer

1. What is your favorite food memory? My favorite food memory is a recent one, a trip to New Orleans with my husband and 8 of our closest friends. We nabbed reservations at Chef Donald Link's Cochon restaurant for lunch and proceeded to eat small plates of exotic pork cheek and pickle combinations, alligator fritters, oyster-absinthe remoulades for three straight hours. It was heaven!! Then we got right up and drove until we found Donalisa's for roast beef po'boys, which is roast beef like none you've ever tasted. My favorite childhood memory involving food is of all the summer meals we enjoyed on our screened porch with simple food straight from our one-acre garden and off the end of our dock. Crab cakes, rockfish, refrigerator pickles, lima beans, okra, peaches from our own trees and corn we had just picked. Very few people grow up that way, and even then I knew how lucky I was. Growing food, preparing it and eating it just seemed to be part of the same process.

2. What is your favorite food smell? My favorite food smell is a stuffed turkey roasting. I think that stuffing cooked outside the bird is pretty much a waste of time.

3. Do you have a favorite "foodie" movie? My favorite "foodie" movie has got to be Annie Hall, when Diane Keaton is attempting to involve Woody Allen in the process of murdering a lobster. And he keeps picturing his family sitting around the Thanksgiving table kvetching and gesturing while in conservative Jewish garb, while hers is sitting in prim Presbyterian silence.

4. What are five ingredients you always have in your kitchen? I always manage to have on hand extra virgin olive oil, onions, soy sauce, lemons and, lately, goat cheese!

5. What five cooking utensils/gadgets do you rely on the most? The utensils I use the most are my grater, my nifty slotted all-purpose knife, my whisk, my food processor and my wine opener.

6. When did you start cooking? I started "cooking" when I was about three in my mother's pantry. She would let me shake all her dried herbs vigorously into my pot of water stew. I used to make spaghetti dinners for high school friends who dropped by. We had a cellar full of canned tomatoes, which made it easy.

7. What's the most challenging recipe you've ever made? The most challenging recipe I ever made was a Buche de Noel ( a rolled layer cake decorated to look like a log on the forest floor) with my sister for her son's wedding reception. We combined 2 recipes and it involved so much calculating (and praying) that it was hilarious.

8. What do you typically have/make for weekend breakfasts? We really enjoy sleeping in on the weekends, so we usually eat simply. Maybe good toast with a bit of chevre and some of Martha's jam smeared on it. On high days and holidays I'll make cheese grits and tomato gravy with bacon and green peppers.

9. What is your family's favorite dish that you cook? They wish I would be more consistent, but they like my potato salad because that recipe never changes.

10. Does anyone else in your family cook? My mother was always my inspiration--despite professing she hated to cook, she turned out three marvelous, complete meals a day. Her specialty was English breakfasts and a dessert called Persian Cream, which was divine. And Art's business is food--he does the world's best omelettes and we wait all year for his Christmas Eve shrimp scampi. But my sister Deborah has never met anything that walks, grows, swims or flies that she has not made into a good meal. She is absolutely fearless in her experimentation and makes full use of all the ethnic markets and farmer's markets near her home.

Make sure to say hello -- and thanks -- to Cathy the next time you see her at the Market... and buy some of that delicious goat cheese and spice mix ... the proceeds benefit the Market!