THIS IS YOUR GRANDMOTHER’S KITCHEN

Classes at Indigo House for 2026 

So many folks today do not have a grandmother to turn to for cooking or gardening advice, not even an aunt or uncle with kitchen skills. It’s just the simple truth that many of our mothers and grandmothers worked full-time jobs for most of the years since World War II. Even in rural parts of the country, over the last 60 years, farmers and farmers’ wives have come to depend on the supermarket for quick and ready-made foods. In an odd cultural turnaround, it seems that hands-on kitchen learning is having a resurgence at the very same time there are fewer of us to pass on those very skills.

It’s been my amazing good fortune to have more than 50 years of experience cooking and preserving food for my family and friends. So I’m that grandma! Plus, I love to show people how to get serious about home provisioning; the goal of always having food for yourself and your family, whether they are bound to you by kinship or friendship. Because I’m a culinary historian as well as a Grandma, in our time together, I’ll be sharing lots of bits and pieces of lore and fact about food across the centuries. No tests-no 250-word essays, I promise.

My skilled and creative late husband built me a kitchen that is wonderful to cook in and especially fun to teach in. It has lots of soapstone counter space, deep cupboards and drawers for my various collections of cooking utensils, numerous shelves for my cookbooks, and many windows that look out into our yard and garden with the barn peeking above the trees. This is the setting where you, I, and our fellow students will play and learn cooking skills that your grandmother would have been proud to pass on to you. Oh, yes, we always have a light lunch together! 

Gather up a friend or two for a class; there is a 6-student maximum. 

CANCELLATIONS: If you cancel up to 3 days (72 hours) before your class, you will receive a refund. Within 72 hours prior to your class, I CANNOT ISSUE REFUNDS  under any circumstances, as I have very limited space available and will have already purchased supplies. I require advanced reservations for all classes.

Directions: I live 16 miles west of Charlottesville, Virginia; I will send directions the week of the class. My postal address is Crozet, but our house is 4 miles north of White Hall. Go figure!  Living in the country has so many wonderful features, but it means that to my new students it can seem a real distance to drive! (For those of us who regularly make the trip to town, it is usually a 25 min trip from Barrack’s Road Shopping Center – but we country folk tend to drive like bats out of hell!).

CLASS DATES and Registration