On a balmy Friday night in mid-September, two strangers — Katerina Kekalo and Eric Chatterjee — sat across from each other at a picnic table on Lisa Green’s deck in Lebanon, the city, and discussed film over food from Lebanon, the country.
Chatterjee, of Hartford, was a first-timer to dinner at Green’s house, where in the summertime she holds the potluck-style monthly gatherings of the Lebanon Gourmet Cooking Club. In the fall and winter months, when the meetings tend to be more heavily attended, she holds them at the Franklin Lodge No. 6, also in Lebanon. Each meeting is themed around a different international cuisine.
Minutes prior, the group of 20 or so guests stood around Green’s kitchen island, the surface of which was barely visible under an array of such aromatic dishes as pita bread with Green’s homemade falafel, rice seasoned with turmeric and cinnamon, bean and plum stew, tabbouleh, meat pies and stuffed grape leaves. Green invited guests to share their experience preparing their dishes, perhaps touching upon how they landed on a particular recipe, whether or not they’d tried making it before, if mistakes were made or what lessons were learned along the way.
Kekalo, who lives in Lebanon but was born in Belarus, couldn’t help but laugh at herself for taking a certain amount of geographic liberty in the dishes she’d made: garlic-fried cauliflower, meat-and-onion lula kebabs and rahatlokum, the gelatinous dessert also known as Turkish delight.
“I know Turkey isn’t Lebanon,” she joked. “But they were once all together under the Ottoman Empire, so I figured, close enough.”
Green encourages such liberties. She has a rules-are-made-to-be-broken mentality toward her meetings, and toward cooking in general. Contrary to the club’s name, people don’t need to prepare a gourmet dish, or really any dish, to attend a meeting. Some, like Chatterjee, choose to donate a few dollars to the group in lieu of bringing food. Others can bring beverages, simple appetizers, things they didn’t even make — Green herself had had a pita-related mishap before that Friday’s dinner, and ended up having to run out for the store-bought kind — as long as the dish is relevant to that month’s region of focus.
“It’s ‘gourmet’ in name only,” she said, adding that in her mind, the most important thing about the club isn’t how sophisticated the meals are, but how enjoyable the company is. “All levels are welcome, even if you’re just learning how to cook. We all have to start somewhere.”
As for Green, she grew up on a potato farm in northern Maine, the oldest of five kids. Her mom wasn’t big on cooking, so Green stepped up to the task. Now 57, she’s had plenty of time to hone her craft; she was cooking meals for her large family by the time she was 13.
“Oh my god, potato everything,” she said. “Mashed potatoes, boiled potatoes, French fries, potato pancakes, potato doughnuts ….”
Not that she had a problem with potato doughnuts, she hastened to add. She very much likes them. Still, her world opened up when she moved to Washington, D.C., when her husband was working toward his graduate degrees there. Suddenly, she was able to experience the tastes and smells of faraway places — Italy and Thailand, Spain and Peru, Vietnam and Greece — without leaving her neighborhood.
“My whole world just went, ‘Ahhh!’ ” she said. She remembers thinking, “I could get used to this.”
And she did. After seven years in the city and all its gastronomical delights, Turkish and otherwise, she was “spoiled rotten by authentic international cuisine.” She enjoyed trying her hand at unfamiliar recipes, sometimes with disastrous but edifying results, and she liked hosting dinner parties and sharing her experiments with her friends.
But when she moved to the Upper Valley, where she works as an assistant property manager at Emerson Place in Lebanon, she was in for another adjustment. The culinary scene wasn’t as homogenous as northern Maine’s, but nor was it as colorful as that of the big city.
So in December 2015, Green signed up for Meetup.com — a website that suggests nearby social gatherings based on members’ listed areas of interest — and created the group, just for fun. She didn’t expect anything to come of it. But before she knew it, 30 respondents had signed up and she realized she now had a cooking club on her hands. It now has more than 300 members.
After an initial brainstorming meeting with some of the club’s first members, Green settled on the first month’s fare: Moroccan.
“We had some people with some expertise in Moroccan food who just raved about it,” she said during an interview at her house, the week before September’s meeting. “They knew how to pour the tea and everything. … It was just fantastic.”
Then came a mashup of Irish/Scottish/English/Celtic, then Greek, then Mexican, Vietnamese, French, Romanian, Cuban, Italian, Native American, Chinese, Spanish, Indian, Peruvian, African, Thai, Cajun/Creole and, most recently, Lebanese.
Next up is German fare, “because of Oktoberfest,” Green explained, with Scandinavian food planned for November.
After the meal introductions, as guests swarmed around the kitchen island and filled their plates, Marie Meservy, of Lebanon, stood off to the side and held her son, William, who also happened to be the youngest guest at the meetup.
“I’m 2,” he said. “Two. Not 10.” He squirmed himself down to the ground, then made a break for it; his mom explained that they’d been coming to these meetings for a while, and he knew enough of the regulars by now to feel comfortable running free.
“It’s almost like a big family,” added her husband, Michael Meservy.
Jake Hart hasn’t been a part of the family for quite as long as the Meservys, but he comes all the way from Weston, Vt. to take part in its gatherings. As a 64-year-old, seventh-generation Vermonter, he relishes the opportunity to try new things, and meet new people.
“I live alone, so it’s something to do that’s fun and gets me out there,” he said, adding that he’s been introduced to a world of “fancy spices” that he hadn’t tried before, but likes. This month, he brought a date-and-apple bread for dessert, and “Arabic cookies.”
“Close enough,” he said.
To learn more about the Lebanon Gourmet Cooking Club, go to Meetup.com and follow the instructions for creating a free profile. Then, search “Lebanon Gourmet Cooking Club” to find the group page. Signing up for the club via Meetup.com is encouraged, as doing so allows members to receive email updates and event details, but anyone is welcome to attend the meetings.
EmmaJean Holley can be reached at eholley@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.