How It Works

First we pick a date. Initially I was hoping that we could whip through a month's worth of meals in a morning, and really I think we could, but it wouldn't be much fun. We have found that it really takes a whole school day to do it right.

We each shop for and prep 2 meals for 4 families and get our kitchens ready to cook in. Then, in an order that depends on what we feel like doing or the demands of planned recipes, we travel from house to house snacking, cooking, and talking. This works well for us because we live fairly close together, but it also works just fine to have 3 people haul all their stuff to one house and do all the cooking there. The only real issue is having enough table or counter space on which to place our delicious meals before we take them home.

Often, the first kitchen hostess will fix a little something for breakfast and the last will fix a little something for lunch. Usually, someone has included a trip to Costco in her preparation and will grab some chicken salad or a loaf of bread to make lunch prep easier. After all, we just cooked 8 meals!

Each kitchen hostess has her workspace organized for the meals she has planned, and has 4 copies of her recipes in plastic sheet protectors to pass out. She assigns the tasks at hand (one of us might brown meat while another chops parsley and another measures liquid ingredients into freezer bags) and keeps things moving at a fast clip. When most of the tasks are completed, attention is turned to doing the dishes and taking out the trash so that each kitchen is left tidy and welcoming for the tired cook at the end of the day.

If the weather's warm it can be handy to bring an ice chest or insulated shopping bag to keep food fresh in, but often we'll just zip home and drop things off in between kitchens.

As we've become more experienced we've learned which types of prep are best done ahead of time and which work well with the group. We've also learned that there are just times when you deserve a gold medal for arriving at all (once, after another trip to urgent care for stitches due to prepping my meal too fast, I showed up at the first kitchen, burst into tears, and went straight to take a bath in the hostess's bathtub). Cooking with friends requires humor and grace!