Food, glorious food

There are quite a few communities dotted around the British Isles, according to the WWOOF UK website (www.wwoof.org.uk).  My own experience of living in a community is limited to Pilsdon, where I am now; Monkton Wyld, just a few miles from here, where I spent a great few weeks last November and in January this year, and a week at Othona community, also quite close by, perched on a cliff above Chesil Beach.

So I’m still quite new to this way of living but I’ve been lucky enough to see how three different groups of people do community life, and to get to know some lovely and interesting people along the way.

A common factor in each of these communities has been that everyone eats together for every meal, which I don't suppose is necessarily the case at all communities out there. (I won’t attempt to answer here the question of how you define a community but refer you to an excellent book called Utopian Dreams by Tobias Jones, which incidentally is where I first heard of Pilsdon.)  

You might think that at a place with no chef, where many people take turns at cooking duties, that the average meal at Pilsdon would be uninspired and no more than edible. But somehow this isn’t the case - tonight for instance we had delicious roast pork belly (our own meat),  sauteed potatoes, garlic, red pepper and onion, with green beans on the side, followed by individual pots of rhubarb creme brulee.  Exquisite! 

Some of my readers may be familiar with my own fairly prosaic culinary talents, so will understand that I was glad to discover that there are normally two cooks per meal, thus allowing blame, should there be any, not to fall entirely on my own shoulders. When you have 25 hungry people beginning to congregate by the dining room just before 7pm, you realise that it’s not just cooking, it’s project management. And there’s not even time to construct a Gantt chart.

And for those who read my last post and are wondering why I’m not now talking about the new baby, it’s because it still hasn’t arrived, six days overdue now (or “six days slippage” in project management terminology).