Cooking in Community
Between Yule and the New Year, I moved in with my dear friend Lauren Bell and her wonderful hubby Bruce, and their lively, 11 year old son Ian. I’ve always dreamt of living in community, and this is my first exciting taste!
In just the first week, we sat down to dinner together 6 nights out of 7! About half the time, Lauren & I would cook together, and the other times, I would cook if she was busy, or she would cook when I was busy. The flow of getting veggies prepped, food cooked, and dishes washed, has been almost effortless between the four of us, as the boys are happy to wash dishes after dinner. Way Cool! The energy in the house feels very well balanced, as two of us are males and two of us are females.
Each time we’ve cooked, we’ve made more than enough food, so that we could enjoy an easy lunch the next day, or simply incorporate the leftover vegetables into a nice breakfast fritata. Anytime we’ve washed lettuces for salad, we’ve washed & chopped enough for about 3 more salads. We zipped up a whole quart of some awesome green garlic salad dressing, which we also poured over some black bean burgers we ate 2 nights in a row. Ian has cleaned up everything on his plate, every night, including the steamed kale and other green veggies! Yay!
Last night, Lauren suggested we make a classic dish her mom had grown up with in the fifties. Lauren has no idea what it’s called, but because we had cabbage, potatoes, onions, and turkey sausage from New Frontiers, it was a go! We saute’d two yellow onions in ghee for a few minutes, then added diced potatoes and let those cook for another five minutes or so, stirring occasionally. Then we tossed in some sliced turkey sausage, and topped everything in the pan with chopped cabbage. When everything was cooked, we sprinkled some pink salt in, and it was done! I wasn’t sure how much I’d like a dish that didn’t have any ground spices and leafy herbs, (or lemon juice), but it was simply D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S. I learned how to cook like The Old Irish, who are actually 1/4 of my ancestry!
I think the best parts of living and cooking together are catching up about our day while we’re in the kitchen together, getting to know each other on even deeper levels, and inspiring each other to expand our comfort zones around food. Bruce doesn’t usually want any avocado, and now, he’s tried both Hass and Fuerte. And everyone now loves squeezing lemon juice on their greens because I explained that it makes the iron in the greens way more absorb able.
Oh Joy! I’m in heaven, and I hope you are too, in the process of developing your joyful routine around creating amazing meals together with family, neighbors, or friends!
