A week and a half ago, my MOPS group came to my house to make dinner. . . or rather 12 dinners . . . for each of us. It was a big project that took lots of planning, lots of shopping, lots of chopping, and lots of cold-space for storage. It was a little intimidating to attack such a big project having never cooked on this big of a scale in such a short time with tons of toddlers underfoot, but I was encouraged by the laid-back, we'll-get-through-it attitude of my friends. Few things make a mom feel on top of the world like taking home happy, tired kids and enough meals for several weeks. We all had such a great time and we're already talking about the next time we do this.
What made it work so well? Primarily, Amarina! She is the one who volunteered to play with the kids outside so we could make meals without interruptions. We had the windows open on the beautiful spring morning and it was fun to hear the kids laughing, and Amarina had a smile every time we checked on her. If you are wondering what the big deal was... she had at least seven (more at times) small kids out there. . .PAINTING!! But everyone outside had fun and the kids were excited to get messy and wet. And by the end of our day, most of them had on only a diaper or undies.
Simone worked at the kitchen table with her little helper. She assembled mostly dry ingredients that didn't need to have a sink nearby: bread mix, spice mixes, repacking bread and cheese that we bought in bulk and broke up into usable quantities.
We had two teams of two in the kitchen: Ema and Jennifer R., Jennifer W. and me. Each pair worked on all 12 of the same recipe, sometimes assembly-line, sometimes parts were done one bag at a time. With only two people per recipe we didn't get in each other's way or have misunderstandings about who had done what already. We made 14 bags of each of 6 dinner recipes, and each of us went home with two of each recipe. We also each took home a bag of beer bread mix. Not including shopping or chopping peppers and onions, we did it all in four and a half hours. Getting over the exhaustion took all of us a few days, though.
I think another reason this worked so well as that we all were pretty easy-to-please food-wise. No one was especially picky -- sure, we left onions out of some of the bags, or cut back on the red-pepper a bit, but we didn't really have picky-eaters. The other key? Flexibility!
I've had enough requests for the menu and recipes, so I'm putting them all in one place. Here is what we made:
- Beer Bread
- Chicken a la Provencal
- Slow Cooker French Dip
- Asian Flank Steak
- Sunday Pot Roast
- Italian Meat Loaf or Meat Balls
- Roasted Chicken
As soon as my freezer has space, I'm ready to do it all again. ... and yesterday I found a neat cookbook that had the menu, grocery list, recipes, and assembly order all in one book. That may be the way to go next time... multiplied by seven, of course!
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