Gourmet Dinner Group celebrates 40th anniversary

Those were the days. A gallon of gas cost 40 cents, the average price of a house was $32,500 and "All in the Family" was America's favorite TV show.

The year was 1973 and the Gourmet Dinner Group had just had its first monthly meeting in Coeur d'Alene.

Fast forward to Saturday, when the group will celebrate its 40th anniversary dinner at the Clark House in Hayden Lake. Forty-two people are expected as guests.

"Way back when we first started, we were doing meals just house to house," said Becky Shellman, co-organizer of the event along with Linda Bakes. "None of us had much money and we were constantly shuffling our children around and all the rest of that. We would have a hostess for each month and that hostess would have a committee to help her. They were the ones who assigned all the rest of us dishes to bring."

Down through the years, the meals got more sophisticated, the children grew up and moved away, the grandchildren arrived and life went on.

The group was not without its dramatic moments.

"One month a year we'd have a men's dinner," Shellman said. "I remember the time in the late '80s we were having it at my house and the men were making chicken Kiev. When the recipe said to flatten the chicken breast, they kind of overdid it - the best thing you could say about the chicken was it was paper thin.

"When I came home from work that evening, my smoke alarms were going off like crazy because the men were starting to cook and somehow it wasn't working out too well. I'm pretty sure that was the last time we had a men's dinner."

Shellman said that these days are different. The group is now at 19 members and the dinners a bit less elaborate. The average age of members is about 70.

"As we became older, we started using simpler recipes and didn't get distraught over buying things like ready-made pie crust," she said. "We've simplified a lot.

"We've talked about having another anniversary dinner in 10 years, but they'll probably have a different organizing committee. I think the best part of this celebration is we don't have to cook it and we don't have to clean it up."