Sunday, March 8, 2009

Food Exchange

A few friends and I came up with a rather brilliant solution to the age-old question, “What’s for dinner?” We are all working moms and although I love to cook, putting a family dinner on the table every night is a challenge. So, we each make a dinner every week and exchange it. The dinner may be fully cooked or may require some assembly by each family the night of dinner. If you are familiar with the stores in which you can pre-make dinners and freeze them for future use, such as Dream Dinners or Super Suppers, you will get the concept. We are each responsible for sending a main dish and a starch. Salads or veg are up to each family.

So, each Sunday, we each make an extra-large batch of one dinner. Most of the time, I can get away with doubling a recipe since all of the kids are still small. We package them up and the husbands cycle through responsibility for delivery.

I used to spend the whole afternoon on Sunday prepping food for the week. While I wish I could get away with that all of the time, I have other things that I also need to get done. Exchanging dinners also reduces the number of different ingredients I need to purchase and so simplifies my grocery shopping and reduces waste. How often had I bought an ingredient for a recipe that I only used part of and left the rest to slowly rot in my fridge? Also, since I am usually guilty of making way more food than my family can conceivably consume, exchanging helps keep me in check and reduces the amount of leftovers we have.

Three families participate, so we each have three dinners for the week that are already thought of, prepped and easy to prepare. On the other nights of the week, we come up with our own food, order take out or have leftovers. It has worked very well for us for about seven months now.

What I Sent This Week:

This is not the healthiest dinner I have ever made, but was specifically requested by my husband, who is hard to say no to since so willingly eats all of my experiments.

My Mom’s Meatloaf

I think this was called Beef Mushroom Loaf and originally came from a Better Homes and Gardens cookbook from the 70s. This recipe is 70s old school. It is not at all fancy, but is beloved by my husband and children alike. My husband loves it so much, he wanted it mentioned in our wedding vows. I think the original recipe called for onions, which when I copied the recipe as a child, I omitted. Nowadays, I sauté some chopped onions and add them to the mixture. I am most decidedly of the camp that thinks that mixing a meatloaf by hand is absolutely the way to go.

  • 1 3-oz can broiled mushrooms
  • Milk
  • 1 slightly beaten egg
  • 1 ½ teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • ½ teaspoon dry mustard
  • Dash pepper
  • 1 ½ cups soft bread crumbs
  • 1 ½ lbs. lean ground beef
  • 2 tablespoons ketchup
Drain the chopped mushrooms, reserving the liquid. Add enough milk to the mushroom liquid to make ½ cup. In a mixing bowl, combine the mushroom liquid, egg, Worcestershire sauce, seasoning and bread crumbs. Let stand for five minutes. Stir in beef and chopped mushrooms. Mix lightly but thoroughly. Shape into a loaf in a 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking dish. Top with ketchup. Bake in a moderate oven (350°) for one hour.

I put the meatloaf in some pans that I use especially for food exchange, ready to pop in the oven.

Sludgy Potatoes, a.k.a. Nigella Lawson’s Creamy Potato Gratin

This is great on almost any holiday, with pork, beef, lamb, whatever. It is an easy and decadent replacement to mashed potatoes and is so flavorful, you don’t need or in fact even want gravy. It also reheats well, which is a boon for the food exchange.

I made 1 ½ times the original recipe, which looks to be more than sufficient to feed the three families. I executed the stove top cooking at home and provided the potatoes in plastic ware with the instructions to heat in the oven the last half of the meatloaf cooking time and then dot with butter and do the 500° blast. This stuff is so darn good, I pretty much ate it for lunch right out of the pot (checking for doneness, ya know).


I would post pictures, but everything is currently raw.


What I Received This Week:

Cranberry Pork Chops and Rice Pilaf
Chicken Lazone


No comments:

Post a Comment