Anyone cook in a "tag team"?

[SeaBean]

I mean, you and a friend get together to cook a meal, then split it up and take it home. Anyone do that? How does it work?

I am thinking this would be great for me & my neighbor who has a 2 year-old. That way, we can kind of take turns keeping the kids occupied when they aren't playing together...

But I'm still wrapping my head around how it would work w/ ingredients, etc. Can anyone share info?

thx!

[Charmie981]

I used to co-lead a cooking group at church. We were concerned about offering only healthy, whole foods, so my co-leader and I would decide on a menu each month. It would consist of two chicken options, two beef options, two seafood options and two vegetarian options. Each of us would come up with one of each option. We would price our meals out at the local grocery store, then distribute order forms and each member (about 8-10 of us) would decide what we wanted and submit her order and payment. Then one of us would do the grocery shopping for the whole group. We only had about three hours to cook, and sometimes were doing 40+ meals, so we split up a lot of the prep work like slicing meat, cooking rice, chopping vegetables, etc. If something was easy to do all at home, one of our members would do it all at home and bring it up ready to distribute.

It worked really well...we did it every month for almost a full year and it was a great way to have freezer meals on hand without having to do a whole day's worth of cooking. We didn't continue it this year because my co-leader had a baby this summer and I'm pregnant (again), but maybe we'll start it up again next fall.

We learned that there it was easiest to do a planning meeting and decide on menus for about three months at a time as a group. Everyone brought cookbooks and we made a list and copied the recipes. We also met twice a month, once for our cooking session and once for a planning session where we would decide what could be done ahead of time. When we weren't doing prepwork ahead of time, we were starting at 6 and finishing at 10 or 11. With doing the prepwork, we got to where we would start at 6 and be finished by 8 or 9 at the LATEST, so the 30-45 minutes in a planning meeting really made a big difference in our time commitment.

[Charmie981]

I've also done it on a smaller scale with just three of us. What we did was decide on a few meals to do, then send out the recipes and shopping list. Each one of us decided on her own how many of that recipe she wanted to make and bought her own groceries and supplies, then we met for prepwork and cooking on a Saturday morning. It took much, much longer (we started at 9 and finished at 3 or 4 and didn't get it all done), but we were also pretty ambitious..I think we had 5 or 6 recipes that we were cooking from. We just kinda tossed all of our ingredients together and made sure that each of us got the amount of finished meals that she had planned for. In one or two cases, there were extra meals and we just split those up among ourselves.

I think this would be made better by sending out a list of things to do at home before cooking day along with the grocery list. Things like chopping your veggies, browning ground beef, slicing sausage, and shredding cheese save so much time when they are already done!

[SeaBean]

Thank you for taking the time to describe that!! VERRRY interesting how you did that w/ the church group. It's a brilliant idea. I will keep working on this and report back.