SAXTONS RIVER — On Thursday, Oct. 15, at 6 p.m., Main Street Arts presents the second local artist featured in this year's Taste of the Arts series.
But the Westminster West-based writer Crescent Dragonwagon is the first whose words and art literally can be tasted. She's a James Beard Award-winning cookbook-memoirist, and a selection of recipes from her seven published cookbooks will be served.
After a meal beginning with Dragonwagon's 7-Layer Middle Eastern Mountain and a cup of Pumpkin-Tomato Bisque, diners will move on to her Zona Rosa Chilequiles, the entrée that won her lunch with Paul Newman in the 1998 Newman's Own Recipe Contest.
Dragonwagon will also tell food-related stories, just after dessert (Augusta's Fall-Down Chocolate Cake), such as the Great Rice Explosion, to Flambé or not to Flambé, When Charlotte Raised Her Glass One Last Time, and what it's like to have Julia Child in a class you are teaching.
Dragonwagon lives in what was her family's summer home in Westminster West (though she continues to spend time in two former home-towns, Eureka Springs, Ark., and New York City).
The daughter of Hollywood biographer Maurice Zolotow and a children's book writer/editor, Dragonwagon also writes and publishes children's books, magazine articles, novels, and poetry.