June 22, 2010
Saving Time and Stress With Cooking Co-ops
By LAURIE WOOLEVER
DINNERTIME in our home, once a source of great pride and pleasure,
became a rather lackluster affair after the birth of our son in 2008.
Mostly it involved repurposing takeout leftovers or, on a more
ambitious night, mixing chunks of frozen vegetable purées, meant for
the baby, with macaroni and cheese.
It was family dinner in the sense that it was marginally edible food,
consumed together in the home, but prepared with the same care and
passion I brought to refilling the cat’s water bowl.
But in February, everything changed. My husband and I became part of a
cooking cooperative, and suddenly we were eating tagliatelle Bolognese,
eggplant Parmesan or chicken adobo, all of it homemade, and only a
fraction of it cooked by me.
A cooking co-op, or dinner swap, is simply an agreement by two or more
individuals or households to provide prepared meals for each other,
according to a schedule. The goal is to reduce the time spent in the
kitchen while increasing the quality and variety of the food eaten.
It’s not a new idea — dinner co-ops have been around for years — but it
was new to me. Mine is based in my apartment building in Jackson
Heights, Queens, which adds to the convenience. Members of our co-op,
made up of four households, including two editors at the James Beard
Foundation and Tony Liu, the executive chef of the Manhattan restaurant
Morandi, exchange meals weekly.
It works like this: Once a week, you cook a dish (chicken enchiladas,
for instance), making enough to provide at least one serving for each
adult member of the co-op. (Children can be assigned half or full
portions, depending on ages and appetites.) Around the same time, your
fellow co-op members are cooking large batches of their chosen dishes.
After setting aside a pan of enchiladas for your household, you divide
and package the rest, usually in reusable containers, and label them
with reheating or assembly instructions. Members then gather and swap
dishes, each walking away with a variety of meals for the coming week’s
dinners and, often, leftovers for extra meals and lunches.
Your big batch of enchiladas has bought you three smaller batches of, say, Greek watermelon-barley salad, lentil soup and Vietnamese pork salad.
Cia Glover, 30, also an editor at the Beard Foundation, is part of a
group of six that swaps monthly in Brooklyn. Members don’t necessarily
come away with a month’s worth of meals, but Ms. Glover is able to
stash away freezer-friendly items for later use. She says she gets
about a week’s worth of lunches and dinners for herself and her fiancé
out of each swap.
“Having a fridge full of food the week after doing a swap helps me to
save about $75 that I’d otherwise spend on lunch,” she said. “Even
though I’ll spend some money making my swap dish, it ends up in my
favor financially.”
The group makes its swap a social occasion, with each month’s host
providing drinks and snacks before the swappers leave with their food.
At the group’s most recent swap on Sunday afternoon, the host, Kristen
Prinzo, 28, served baked French toast, vegetable frittata, prosecco,
orange juice, charcuterie and cheese.
“I’ve made a lot of new friends in the swap group,” said Ms. Prinzo, a
senior manager at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. “Every month I look
forward to seeing them and eating and drinking and chatting about our
lives before we exchange the food we’ve cooked for each other.”
After overseeing an occasional food swap among students at Kula Yoga
Project, a studio in Lower Manhattan, Kaari Pitkin, 38, a producer at
WNYC radio, recently organized a monthly food swap among her colleagues
at the station. “When it comes time to go shopping, not having to think
about buying so many ingredients for so many different meals, I am
always delighted about that,” she said.
Cate Bruce-Low, 32, of TriBeCa, is part of a monthly swap among a
handful of families in their neighborhood. Swapping has saved time in
her household. “It does take extra time to make that one meal for so
many people,” said Ms. Bruce-Low, who teaches cooking classes for
children. “But then you have the luxury of having a stockpile of food.
You get extra time to hang outside with your kids and not have to be
home early to scrounge up dinner.”
She added that households whose community-supported agriculture
memberships leave them overwhelmed with too much of an unpopular
vegetable “can find a recipe that will use all of it up and avoid five
nights of collard greens in a row.”
There are, of course, pitfalls to that approach. Kelly Moreland, who
owns a used-children’s-goods store called Mama Goose in Ithaca, N.Y.,
admitted to using her co-op meal as a “dumping ground” for the kale and
squashes that can bedevil even the most creative member of a winter
community-supported agriculture group.
This got her in a bit of trouble. “I was doing a lot of winter
vegetable soups,” Ms. Moreland, 45, said. “One of the other families
had to speak up. They have growing boys with big appetites, and they
said that they needed more meals that could be eaten with a fork.”
Sometimes the issues are bigger. One swapper, who wished to remain
anonymous so as not to cause offense, complained about a group member
who always included pungent, highly perishable cooked seafood in her
prepared meals, which are meant to last for up to a week in the
refrigerator.
Andy Remeis, who lives in Boise, Idaho, said that she quit a dinner
co-op after several weeks in which one member made Hamburger
Helper-style meals. “We don’t eat that way on a bad night,” Mrs. Remeis
said. “I let it go for a while, thinking that she’d see what the rest
of us were cooking and get the hint, but she didn’t. My husband likes
to eat really healthy food, so that was my scapegoat — that we had to
quit because it wasn’t working for my husband.”
Mrs. Remeis, 45, is a co-author, along with Alex Davis and Diana Ellis, of “Dinner at Your Door”
(Gibbs Smith, 2008), which provides co-op-friendly recipes and
practical guidelines for starting and maintaining a co-op. To avoid
experiences with Sandra Lee-style swappers, whose semi-homemade dishes
might not be their style, swappers are encouraged to seek out
like-minded cooks before establishing a group, Mrs. Remeis said.
Ms. Moreland and Mrs. Remeis employ a hot-food delivery model — each
household cooks for the whole group one night a week, packages the food
hot and delivers the meals to the other households in time for that
night’s dinner. (Geographic proximity is crucial in this scenario.)
Liz Garton Scanlon, a children’s-book author in Austin, Tex., has been
swapping dinners with various groups of families for six years, using
the hot-food delivery model. Ms. Garton Scanlon, 43, said that she was
drawn to the concept when her children were very young and she “was
feeling mind-boggled at the number of meals a family requires.”
“It always feels to me that you actually get more than you give in the
co-op,” she said, “and so the myth of it being too much work was rather
quickly dispelled.”
Kristin Curtis, 39, is part of a four-family co-op in Raleigh, N.C.,
that cooks gluten-free meals to accommodate one member’s celiac
disease. Ms. Curtis, a former pharmaceutical-sales representative who
is developing a sales-training business, said dinner swapping makes
life at home more efficient. “It just seems much easier to keep the
kitchen clean on a daily basis now, even if on the one day that I cook
the kitchen might look like a bomb went off,” she said.
Many co-op participants say that their grocery bills haven’t changed,
but that they’re spending less on restaurant meals or ordering takeout.
“Having all this great homemade food in the fridge forces me to eat in
for dinner, so right there I’m saving money,” said Dana Casey, a member
of the Brooklyn group, who works in marketing.
Ms. Casey, 31, said that she’ll bring a swap meal to the office in lieu
of buying lunch, which also saves money. And Ms. Garton Scanlon said
that “buying large amounts of a few ingredients tends to be less
expensive than buying lots of ingredients for many meals, so there’s a
bulk benefit.”
After several months of weekly meal swapping, I can’t imagine returning
to the bad old days of those half-hearted meals. Dinnertime, once just
another chore, now holds the pleasure of discovery. The dust has been
blown off my once-neglected cookbooks and kitchen gear. And, best of
all, my husband and I have had the pleasure of feeding our son
toddler-size portions of chicken paprikash, Tuscan white bean and tuna
salad, and aloo gobi (a cauliflower dish), prepared by a trusted
community of friends and neighbors.
Choosing Recipes That Travel Well
CASSEROLES of all types tend to travel, freeze and reheat well, whether
you are starting a co-op, cooking for a crowd or just using weekends to
cook for the week. Examples include chilaquiles, enchiladas,
spanakopita, gratins of all varieties, savory bread puddings, lasagna
Bolognese and any number of other baked or stuffed pastas.
Soups, stews and chili make sense in this format, as do braised meats, roast chicken, meatloaf
or meatballs. Food served at room temperature, like poached chicken and
salmon, work well, especially when accompanied by a spicy or creamy
sauce.
Many pasta sauces can be cooked and chilled ahead of time, although carbonara or butter-based sauces do not reheat well.
Vegetable salads work best when components are packaged separately and assembled and dressed just before serving.
A $324 bowl of beef noodles at Niu Ba Ba in Taipei, Taiwan
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