The Potluck Club (41 page)
Authors: Linda Evans Shepherd and Eva Marie Everson
Tags: #ebook, #book
¼ teaspoon dill weed
Drain pineapple, reserving 2 tablespoons of the juice. Drain tuna and line salad bowl with lettuce. Toss tuna, pineapple, cucumbers. Pour into bowl. Blend mayo, salt, and reserved juice. Pour over salad. Sprinkle with dill weed.
Evangeline’s Cook’s Notes
I’d never had anything quite like this before, but I was glad that after all the Potluck Club rush, it was left behind in my fridge. I ate it for dinner the night baby Faith was born, the night Jan entered heaven.
Eva Marie Everson
—I would like to begin by thanking Linda Evans Shepherd for the opportunity to work with her on this project. Linda, I can still see myself sitting in BWI, trying to catch a nap as I waited for a delayed plane, answering my cell phone and hearing you rattle on about this neat little idea. A “let me think about it” and a while later, and we were off on an adventure we couldn’t have imagined then! Thank you, girlfriend, for thinking of me when you first caught the vision for “the girls”!
Thank you to my husband, who didn’t mind my going off to the high country of Colorado for more than a week to work on this project and who cooked/grilled all our meals.
Thank you, Paul and Jim Shepherd, for sharing your wife/mom and the cabin for quite a few days. Thank you, Laura, for not staying “mad” too long upon our return. We’ll try to keep the time away shorter from now on.
Thank you, Deb Haggerty, for introducing me to Linda, with whom I have discovered that I’m funny.
Thank you to my mother, my grandmother, and my aunts—Bettye and Janice—for the recipes. You know how much I hate to cook.
And thank you to the members of Word Weavers. You’re a great group of critiquers.
Linda Evans Shepherd—
What can I say about my dear friend Eva? Let’s see, as she’s paying me to compliment her I can tell you she’s really, really cool and a
fantastic
writer. Okay, so she’s not paying me, but she’s still really, really cool and a fantastic writer, and one of my dearest friends.
I would also like to acknowledge those who thought Eva and I, two strong and determined women, could not write a whole novel together. What were you thinking? Not only did we do it once, we did it again with the next installment of the Potluck due out next year. What fun we’ve had living dual lives with our Potluck characters.
Of course I would like to acknowledge our families, who have so sweetly let Eva and I lead double lives. Paul, you’re the best. To my son, Jim, you’re one great kid. And daughter, Laura, you’re the most beautiful eighteen-year-old girl in the world. You may not be like other girls, but your joy and sweet spirit are so precious to me. Thank you for all the wordless songs you sing to your mommy.
And finally, thank you, God, for allowing me so many blessings and the privilege of writing this book with Eva.
The Authors
—we would like to thank our wonderful editors, Jeanette Thomason and Kristin Kornoelje, as well as the rest of the Revell team! Thank you so much for believing in a project such as
The Potluck Club
, for “seeing” the girls as easily as we do.
Thank you to the awesome women of AWSA (Advanced Writers & Speakers Association) who have prayed us through illnesses, family crises, blizzards, and rewrites. You’re the best!
A very special thank you to the town of Frisco, Colorado (aka, Summit View!) for being our prototype. A really, really special thank you to Frisco’s Butterhorn Bakery & Café (Higher Grounds Café) for those midafternoon lattes we have grown accustomed to.
Another thank you to the Summit County police department for giving us the inside scoop on your world as we filled out the reports on Eva’s lost wallet. Who knew the event would end up in a book?
And, finally, a huge thank you to our Heavenly Father, to our precious friend and Bridegroom Jesus Christ, and to the Holy Spirit, who binds us together as sisters in him by whom we pray.
Linda Evans Shepherd
has turned the “pits” of her life into stepping stones following a violent car crash that left her then-infant daughter in a year-long coma and permanently disabled (see LindaAndLaura .com).
Linda is the president of Right to the Heart Ministries and is also an international speaker (see ShepPro.com), radio host of the nationally syndicated Right to the Heart radio, occasional television host of Daystar’s Denver Celebration, the founder and leader of Advanced Writers and Speakers Association (see AWSAWomen .com), and the publisher of Right to the Heart of Women ezine (see RightToTheHeartOfWomen.com), which goes to more than ten thousand women leaders of the church.
She’s been married twenty-six years to Paul and has two teenagers, Laura and Jimmy.
Linda has written more than eighteen books, including
Intimate
Moments with God
(co-authored with Eva Marie Everson from Honor/Cook),
Tangled Heart: A Mystery Devotional
(Jubilant Press), and
Grief Relief
(Jubilant Press).
Award-winning author and speaker
Eva Marie Everson
is a Southern girl who’s not that crazy about being in the kitchen unless she’s being called to eat some of her mama or daddy’s cooking. She is married to a wonderful man, Dennis, and is a mother and grandmother to the most precious children in the world.
Eva’s writing career and ministry began in 1999 when a friend asked her what she’d want to do for the Lord, if she could do anything. “Write and speak,” she said. And so it began.
Since that time, she has written, co-written, contributed to, and edited and compiled a number of works, including
The Shadows
Trilogy
(Barbour Publishing) and
Sex, Lies, & the Media
(co-written with her daughter, Jessica, and published by Cook Communications). She is a Right to the Heart board member and a member of Christian Women in Media & Arts and a number of other organizations.
A graduate of Andersonville Theological Seminary, she speaks nationally, drawing others to the heart of God. In 2002, she was one of six journalists chosen to visit Israel. She was forever changed.
To read more about the authors
or to find additional recipes, visit:
A Sneak Peek at the next adventure of the Potluck Club
Clay Whitefield burrowed under the musky blankets, eking out an attempt at a few more minutes of sleep before heaving himself out of bed. The weight from the quilt his grandmother had made upon his arrival into the world laid over him like the history of her people, the Cheyenne. But his grandmother and her people were the last thing on his mind.
Outside the window of his second-story flat, the town of Summit View, Colorado, was coming to life. With or without him. His boss, the editor and publisher of the
Gold Rush News
, was most likely sitting at his desk by now, wondering when Clay would amble in. Shifts were changing at the hospital and down at the sheriff’s department. Children were preparing for school. Sally Madison, owner of Higher Grounds Café, had already unlocked the doors to her establishment. Larry, her cook, had slapped a heap of lard onto the flat grill, readying it for the morning specials. One of Sal’s girls had started the coffee. The very thought of it brewing interrupted Clay’s dreams, and his nose twitched.
He opened one eye. Across the room on a scarred table, his gerbils, Woodward and Bernstein, lay wrapped around each other as though they were one. Nearby, his laptop sat at attention, the screen saver banner sliding across its face, teasing him.
Clay Whitefield, it said. Ace Reporter.
He’d worked last night until the early hours of the morning—thus his attempt at sleeping in. The big story of his career had kept him up, driving him toward a completion he feared would never come. This story—this single story—had tickled his imagination when he was a child, encouraged him to do well when he’d gone off to the University of Northern Colorado to study journalism, and propelled him back to his hometown upon graduation.
It was the story of a group of women who called themselves the Potluck Club. But it was more than their monthly gatherings that kept his fingers to the keyboard and his pen and notebook in an ever-ready position. It was their past secrets and current escapades.
It was, most particularly, their youngest member.
Because Clay Whitefield believed with everything his journalistic heart had in it that Donna Vesey was carrying the deepest secret of them all.
Don’t miss what’s brewing in the next Potluck Club book, coming Summer 2006