Meal Exchange Reinvented

Since our meal exchange had lasted five years, I felt like it would go on forever, but with larger families and the increasing demands of school-age children, the families in our group simply got busier, or priorities changed, and it gradually fizzled out. 

That's not to say we no longer needed help with meals.  My family has been in a bad dinner rut since January in which we were cycling through a particularly bleak rotation of quick meals like canned soup, pasta or quesadillas. As Chris' travel schedule increased, my motivation to plan, cook and clean up after dinner sank.

It was during this state of dinner desperation that my friend floated an idea by me - getting together as a group to cook meals to freeze. It would be like meal exchange except more social.  We'd cook together and not in isolation in our own kitchens.  The only problem is that St. Paul homes are not large and no one has a big enough kitchen to handle large-scale cooking.  My house was eventually nominated because my kitchen is the biggest one of all of our otherwise small kitchens and it's not dead-end, galley-style kitchen. With the location, participants and menu set, our meal exchange was reborn.

The ironic part of my participation in this new version of meal exchange is that I had no idea what was going on.  One of my friends picked the menu, another wrote out the extensive grocery list and the friend with the Costco membership did all the grocery shopping. All I really understood was that everyone was showing up at my house at noon and that Chris was going to get the kids out of the house for me.

When everyone arrived, they came with crates and crates of food, a folding card table for additional work space and extra culinary tools and set up shop in my kitchen and dining room.  One friend taped a menu in our dining room with who was assigned to each meal so that we could stay on track.  

For many of the seven hours of cooking, Baby Sam was snuggled on his mom's back.

One onion into chopping 30, Anna went hunting for my kids' swim goggles.

The completion of each set of meals was reason for celebration!

My unheated porch became the cooling-off area.  You can see my porch windows all steamed up!

Seven hours later it was a crazy scene at my house.  My four children had been home for hours by that point because Chris couldn't keep them away all day and they were joined by my friend's two kids, because her 12-year-old babysitter couldn't be trusted to watch two young children for that long.  All were parked in front of a movie on my laptop and nibbling on crackers and granola bars and whatever else we were calling dinner. I hauled out at least 10 bags of recyclables to the porch while Chris took bags of trash out to the alley.  My kitchen floor was filthy after seven hours of all matters of food being dropped and mushed on the floor.  Us moms were exhausted and hungry.  Despite being someone tries to be physically active, I had no idea that cooking could leave me with as many muscle aches as a soccer game. 

But...we were (mostly) finished with 15 meals ready to go into the freezers of each family. That's a half-month's worth of meals!  When you factor in the occasional nights that we won't eat at home and the fact that some of the meals we made were so large that there'd be leftovers, we will be able to easily fill in the rest of the month's dinner nights with grilled cheese, pancakes and canned soup.