Guide to Starting Your Own Cooking Club!

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Gabe and I really enjoyed cooking together, and even his backhoe got to help shovel pieces of garlic!

My MOMS® Club really rocks – the ladies and activities we've had over the 2 1/2 years I've been in it have gotten me through tough times navigating motherhood, and have helped me to make some very good friends. I'm now the president of my chapter and two other moms on the Board with me came up with this creative idea to create a cooking club!

The kids really got involved and made it even a better experience.

Gabe loved peeling the onions.

The idea is that we all gather and cook a week's worth of meals together, easing the cooking burden for all of us and making it fun! All the meals we took home could be frozen. We were each assigned ingredients to bring (breaking it down so each person pays about the same amount for her ingredients), but each of us brought our own meat in zip-lock bags labeled with our names. For example, I had to bring 10 cups of soy sauce, another girl had to bring 10 cups of honey, another brought just corn meal and canned corn, etc. It made it easier on each of us to just have to bring an ingredient or two.

Here's how it works – they picked four recipes from onceamonthmom.com that can be easily frozen. Then, you have to know how many people are coming to your cooking club. From there, download a mini menu spreadsheet from the website. This will do the math for you to figure out your serving size and how much of each ingredient you'll need.

Here are the recipes they picked:
Teriyaki Honey Chicken
Mexican Shepherd's Pie
Ham and Cheese Pinwheels
Lentils and Rice (their own recipe)

We had 8 moms and 4 meals to cook, so we split up into groups of 2 and each group cooked one meal.
We really lucked out using a church industrial size kitchen with a large room next to it where the kids could run around and play while we cooked! We brought ride-on toys and set out puzzles to keep them occupied, but many of the kids were interested in helping us cook, especially Gabe, which made the process even more rewarding.

The best part – after hanging out with friends, you leave with 4 home cooked meals to eat at home! That's four less days I have to cook!