Gourmet Dinner Club- Nelson County Virginia, 1984

In the eighties, living up Freshwater Cove, in Nelson County, cash money was always in short supply. We were living rent free in a two hundred year old log house adjoining the land I had bought with the money from my Uncle Wats. The plan was to build a house, grow organic produce for sale, and raise our kids.

It was a beautiful spot and had lots of potential with good bottomland, a couple of small creeks, and about ten acres of woods. Two of my kids were born there and I worked just enough to pay a few small bills while they were small. Their dad worked as a stone mason, planted trees and tried to make headway. Working in Nelson back then pretty much meant inventing your own business since there wasn’t much in the way of jobs locally. I stitched leather at home for a guy up Buck Creek for a few years, sold my hand woven shawls, placemats, and rugs for a while, final cleaned construction sites and taught basket weaving up at the ski resort. We  worked  the gardens  constantly. Tilling planting , weeding, picking, selling at the farmers markets. Canning and freezing. Going out to dinner was not something that ever happened.

The creative work around we came into was the Gourmet Dinner Club. As a  group of six couples we met once a month at one of our houses for a dinner cooked my one couple. Each couple only had to cook two times per year and it was totally up to them what they had on the menu. We all chipped in on the wine for each meal. It was a great solution and one I think I would like to try again. We managed to keep it going for a couple of years before we all moved on to other things.

One of the meals was a potluck picnic where we all packed up our favorite picnic dishes on a blanket and then drew straws for which one we got to eat. A couple of times we had a Luau at Bob and Sally’s and a hot tub rental company from Lynchburg brought in a trailer with a hot tub already half filled and left it for the whole weekend. It was heated with a small propane tank and when it ran out we swiped the tank from the cookstove at the house. That was great fun.

We had a dinner at our house where we roasted a leg of lamb that we had gotten from over Shipman way, all homegrown dishes of asparagus, twice baked potatoes, and homemade raspberry sorbet for desert. Another time we had our homegrown pork, and a flaming plum pudding. Once I made a stew that had all kinds of fish and sausages in it, homemade bread, with strawberry meringues. Some of the members got really fancy and used ingredients that were hard to get and complicated recipes. It was all really good food, better than any restaurant, and affordable.

The best thing about it was the people time though. We got to drink wine, visit and relax without a long drive when it was time to go home. I always looked forward to these meals, especially when they were at somebody else’s house. It was a fair amount of work to set up, clean and cook for twelve guests at a time. I definitely recommend trying it though.

-Wendy lee,

writing at edgewisewoods.com