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. 

Meal Exchange From Start to Finish

For the meal exchange in April, I decided to make Red Curry with Tofu and Vegetables.  Not only is it delicious, but it's easy to make, freezes well and is cheap.  For less than $55 at a local Asian grocery, I bought all the ingredients needed for six meals to swap at the meal exchange, plus an extra meal for my family to enjoy.

I took on the mass production of cooking in stages.  I diced seven packages of tofu and after getting the first batch (of four) going in a light layer of oil, I mixed a large batch of red curry paste with cans of coconut milk in a stock pot.  I put my roommates Andy and Danielle to work taping labels to the Ziploc bags that would hold the different portions of the meal and measuring and packing dry rice.  Once the tofu and curry sauce were finished, they ladled the contents of the stock pot into Ziploc bags.  I had chopped most of the vegetables the night before, so I was able to pull those out of the refrigerator and start cooking.  I blanched the broccoli so it wouldn't get as mushy when frozen and then reheated, and then sauteed the remaining vegetables.  When finished, we added the vegetables to the bags of curry sauce and tofu.

My two sous-chefs

A canning funnel ended up being really helpful in filling Ziploc bags with liquids.

The result of all that chopping, frying, sauteing, blanching and scooping was six meals packaged, labeled and ready to go into a friend's freezer.  I know the Hello Panda cookies aren't Thai, but when I saw them at the store, I thought they'd be an unexpected treat for whoever picked my meal.  

On Saturday morning, I pulled the Ziplocs of curry sauce and tofu out of the freezer and started to pack up.  All these meals are heavy, so I've learned the best way to transport them is with a laundry basket.

At the meal exchange, we group the meals on the tables by type - vegan, vegetarian or meat.  Even though I'm not vegan, my meal this past month happened to contain no animal products, so it went with the rest of the vegan meals.

Before we choose meals, everyone explains what they brought.  As I listened to everyone describing their meals, I was taking mental notes of which meals I wanted to try to get first!  Every month there's something that ends up being really popular and goes quickly.

We draw numbers to decide who chooses meals first.  Everyone in group 1 chooses one meal and then the last group chooses two meals, before working backwards again to group 1, who then choose two meals.  It looks like organized chaos as a volunteer calls out whose turn it is to choose a meal and participants are in various stages of paying attention due to chatting with friends or chasing after their kids, but after nearly four years and one iPhone app developed just for the occasion, the system works for us! 

William wants his mom to pick a curried zucchini soup.

William's sister Noelle is pretty excited about the soup too.

An hour later, after all the meals are packed up in laundry baskets, the kids have had a chance to play and the adults to catch up, we head home to make our kids lunch and restock our freezers.  For all the work that goes into preparing for meal exchange, it's worth it when I look into my freezer and see that dinner is already made.

Why order take-out when there's a homemade Thai meal in your freezer?

What's for Dinner?

Frozen pizza never tastes so good than when it's made by one of the members of our meal exchange.  After a busy day of weekend chores and time spent enjoying summer-like weather in March, Chris left this afternoon for softball practice before dinner and I was on my own with the kids until bedtime.  I hadn't even thought about what to do for dinner until that point, so thankfully, I had a stash of meal exchange meals in the freezer.  I pulled out a pizza, turned on the oven, and then headed upstairs to give the kids baths while our gourmet, made-from-scratch dinner baked. 

So many nights are like this.  Weekdays are of course the craziest.  It's fortunate that Chris and I are both home before 5:00 p.m., but that still doesn't allow us much more than time to feed the baby, set the table and either microwave or bake already-prepared food.  Maybe, just maybe, we'll have time to prepare a salad or other simple side dish.  Dinner prep was a little easier when I was home with the kids, but not by much, since taking care of little kids who couldn't entertain themselves for more than a minute left little time for much of anything.  Weekends end up being a blur of doing all the things we don't have time for during the week. 

When my friends and I, all of whom had young children, realized we were all experiencing similar levels of chaos at dinner time, the meal exchange was born.  For a year and a half now, we've undertaken the communal effort of feeding our families homemade meals.  The meal exchange has become a way of life and is something I'm grateful for, even in those months when I feel like I'm running out of time and am too overwhelmed to pull together such large quantities of food in one fell swoop.  But then when we all gather and I hear about the delicious meals everyone has made and I catch up with friends I haven't seen all month, I'm reminded how the committment to the meal exchange is worth it.

I've realized other benefits I hadn't anticipated.  I've lived abroad and have many friends from other countries and enjoy experiencing new cuisines.  It's easy to forget that even within my own culture there is such a variety of food traditions and it's been fun experiencing the food preferences and culinary styles of the other participating families.  Some people tended to cook comfort foods, while others brought dishes I had never heard of.  Over all these months, we've had multiple versions of lasagna, pizza, enchiladas, chili and Tator Tot Hotdish, yet they have reflected the cooking styles of the individual participants.  Some of these dishes have become part of my family's regular rotation. 


As much as we all rave about our meal exchange to our friends, we have experienced some growing pains along the way.  Our group almost split in two, as the vegetarian and vegans were no longer participating in the "anything goes" month and the meat-lovers were admitting they weren't as satisfied with the alternating vegetarian months.  A split would have been a disappointment, because while we all wanted meals we'd truly enjoy, the monthly exchanges are as much for socializing as they are for restocking our freezers.

We kept the group together by switching from an exchange format to a swap.  Instead of bringing enough meals for everyone participating, we bring a set number of meals, and then going in rounds, we choose what meals we want.  This format takes a little longer, but we realized it's workable if we have someone designated to manage the process and make sure everyone has chosen a meal before starting the next round.  It has also allowed us to include more people since the "subs," friends we had made in ECFE or a moms group, had become devoted partipants.

One thing has changed in the last year and a half.  Many of our families have gotten bigger!  Most of us met in a group for new parents at a local hospital when our first kids were born, and since then, many of us have added a second kid to the mix.  If we didn't think life could possibly get busier, it did.  Although the more meals for our freezer, the better, a few months ago, we finally started admitting to each other that making nine, four-serving meals every month was becoming too much.  So the other major change to our format is that we're only bringing six meals each month instead of nine.  Six sounds like a lot, but after making nine meals, six seems easy!

Dinner is Served

Although I enjoy cooking, it's become a chore since Oliver was born and dinner time isn't a time for relaxation anymore, but rather is usually a stress point. The baby is cranky, I'm cranky, we're all hungry and I'm frustrated with myself both because I'm still not able to pull a simple dinner together despite being home all day and because I can't ignore these self-imposed unrealistic expectations. I have a few meals I can make quickly and without a recipe - about the only food I can muster the energy to make these days - but I grew bored of those long ago. So when the e-mail from a friend went out asking who would be interested in doing a monthly meal exchange, I almost responded in all capital letters I was that 100% ON BOARD, SIGN ME UP, WHEN DO WE START? Hallelujah, the meal exchange was going to be the answer to my prayers. When one friend responded with, "So I'm NOT the only one who's a mess when it comes to dinner time?" I realized I'm not the only one either.

The nine of us who make up the new meal exchange club met in a new parents group at a local hospital and we keep seeing each other at soup swaps one or another hosts. It is at these swaps that we bring six quarts of soup and then go home with six different quarts of soup, all bound to taste better than our own creations just because someone other than ourselves made it. I can only imagine that during the hiatus of soup swaps during the busy, and hot, summer months, many of us in this newly formed meal exchange group had drawn a blank on what to serve for dinner, had stared into an empty freezer and had wondered how six quarts of soup could have gone so quickly.

The meal exchange club doesn't officially kick off until October, but the organizer threw the option out there to do an abbreviated swap with anyone who could cook seven, four-person meals with a week's notice. It was a lot of work to multiply a recipe by SEVEN, (makes me nervous about next month when everyone will be participating and I'll need to make the same recipe nine times over) but I reminded myself what a couple of hours of work would yield. I peeled 11 pounds of butternut squash, chopped four heads of cauliflower, diced seven onions, rinsed six cans of chickpeas, poured lemon juice by the cup instead of the teaspoon and spilled tiny granules of cous cous all over my kitchen as I tried to pour carefully measured cups of cous cous into Ziploc bags. A large bag of curry from bulk spices section of the grocery store went along with everything else into the largest pot we own, the stock pot Chris bought for his home brewing. Since I split a lot of the preparation over two days, the pot had to go into the refrigerator, which required me to remove a shelf so it would fit. Once I was finished cooking, the pot's contents had cooled and my kitchen had fully embraced the pungent aroma of curry, I laid seven one-gallon Ziploc bags upright on the floor of my kitchen, carefully ladled an equal portion into each bag, sealed them and laid them flat on a shelf in the freezer to freeze into a thick sheet of curry.

We trooped into our friend's house last night carting babies and boxes or large canvas tote bags full of instant dinners for the weeks ahead. We spread out on the table hotdishes, the main components for a beans and rice dinner, a stew and vacuum-packed pizzas. We repacked one of each meal in our containers, stuck around to socialize some and then headed home.

This morning I debated what I should make for dinner tonight. If I have the time, should I try to come up with something fresh and original or should I already break into my stash of homemade frozen dinners? You can probably guess what the answer is. That's what they're there for, right? With my freezer now stuffed with dinners and soups acquired at the first soup swap of the fall season, I grabbed the most accessible dinner, a vegetarian tator tot hotdish. Add bread and a salad, and voila, dinner is served.