Join a Cooking Club

A cooking club, did you say? I have run across several definitions for a cooking club. Here are my 2 favorites:

1) A group of friends gets together once every two weeks or once a month and makes a number of meals for each group member to take home to their freezer. For example, you have 2 friends. The three of you get together and make a menu. You want to have 5 different dinners each to take home, so you agree on 5 recipes.

They might be: lasagna, chicken casserole, roast beef with potatoes and gravy, ham with scalloped potatoes, and stew. You go out and do the shopping, split the cost, go to someone's kitchen, make the food, help clean up, and go home with 5 dinners each. You could divide out the jobs as well, so that one of you does the shopping, one of you hosts the event in their kitchen, etc.

For the above menu, you would want to each bring 4- 9x13 pans to put the entrees in, and one empty ice cream pail to put the stew in.

If you have several crock-pots between you, you could bring those too. Someone could prepare the scalloped potatoes in one or two large ones, the stew in 1 or 2 more. Put those on to cook while you are making the lasagna. The roast beef and ham could also be put in crock-pots. The group can plan it out and see how it would work best.

2) The second type of cooking club I like to dub the "casserole group."
In this cooking club, your group of friends and you do your own cooking at home. On the planned day, you get together and swap a pre-determined number of frozen casseroles. For example, my three friends and I have chosen the last day of the month to swap food, and we have chosen to use a square foil pan size. There are two large families in our group and two small families. The two small families need only 1 of the square pans for a meal; the two larger families need two.

We agree that each person in the group makes 8 square pans of casserole to take to the swap. That way, each person will also go home with 8. They will have 2 pans each of four different kinds of casserole. I know this is confusing so here is a detailed example:

The group consists of 4 people: Me and 3 friends.
I make: 8- 8x8 foil pans of spaghetti and meatballs and cover and freeze them.
Friend #1 makes: 8 square foil pans of chicken enchiladas, covers and freezes them.
Friend #2 makes: 8 square foil pans of beef burritos...
Friend #3 makes: 8 square foil pans of sweet and sour chicken balls with rice...

Because we know a month ahead that we are swapping on the last day of the month, we can do our cooking on any day that is convenient to us. Then we wrap, label and freeze. The work is all done.

We bring our pans with us to one person's house. Each of the 4 people (me and my 3 friends) go home with 2 pans of spaghetti, 2 pans of enchiladas, 2 of burritos, 2 of sweet and sour with rice.

The casserole club is actually my absolute favorite of all the cooking clubs. I like the flexibility of cooking on a day that works for me. I like bringing home entrees that are already frozen and ready to put in my freezer. I just love it. If your group lasts a long time, you may want to consider investing in some better pans than the foil ones because they wear out over time and develop little cracks and holes.

Have fun with this. Hopefully your cooking chores will be lightened and your heart will be also.