Once a Month Cooking Part 1 - Dinner at Your Door

I've blogged about Let's Dish (a store you go to to assemble a month's worth of meals), packing meals for the entire week every Sunday and making Cannon's meals for the week all at once, so it shouldn't come as a surprise that I LOVE efficiency in the kitchen. I would rather spend time doing a plethora of other things besides cooking. I'll just be honest and say that cooking is not my favorite thing to do. I do it because I like to eat. With that in mind, I've tried a variety of bulk-cooking or once a month cooking techniques to find what works best for our family.

I've received a multitude of questions of how this once-a-month cooking works, so here's a little blog series to tell you how I do it and how we like it.

When we lived in Dallas I discovered this book called "Dinner at Your Door" that inspired me to organize a little thing called a dinner co-op with my friends Heather and Laura.

We all lived within minutes of each other, which was crucial for the success of our little group. Each of us was assigned a night to cook and deliver dinner. So, every Tuesday night I cooked dinner for all three families and delivered the dinners to Heather and Laura. On their nights they cooked for all three families and delivered dinner to our door. Usually we had enough for leftovers. So, I cooked once a week, but we ate great the entire week! SUCCESS! And we made friends and built relationships in the process.

A few tips that made our group successful:

• We planned our meals out six weeks in advance, which insured that we didn't all cook pasta the same week. 
• We also all purchased the same sized Pyrex dishes so that we were certain to be giving each other the same amount of food each night. 
• We outlawed a few foods that we knew we didn't like (anchovies anyone?), but also tried to keep an open mind and try things that we might not have cooked ourselves (hello my new love: fennel risotto).
• We established a "30-minute delivery time window" so that we could know when dinner was arriving every night. 
• The biggest thing was that we all lived within five minutes of each, so I could deliver the other two meals and be home again in 20-30 minutes (depending of course on how long I stood on the doorstep and talked!).

I was actually sad to move to Allen and give up my dinner co-op because I enjoyed it so much. We had fun planning our co-op, getting to know each others family and children, and trying new food.

If you're interested in starting a food co-op I would HIGHLY recommend you read the book - it had more than enough details to help you get/stay organized. I followed it to a "T."