Cohousing-L Mailing List: Stories/ just another supper, almost 1 yr in

[Lynn Nadeau (welcome]

In response to requests that the list not get too tipped towards Problems 
We Need Help Solving (which is a basic and excellent function of this 
list!), and desires expressed for more "windows on the coho world", I'll 
contribute a slice of life at RoseWind, being last night's supper at the 
common house. 

Seems a little  boring to me, as I write it, but it might be interesting 
to those who are trying to imagine What Do They Really DO? The rest of 
you can skim...

We do team-cooked suppers Mondays, potluck Thursdays, and beverages and 
snacks-verging-on-potluck TGIF on Friday afternoons, and a monthly 
potluck brunch. We've been doing meals in our new common house since last 
fall. Some of us have been part of the project for 13 years, including 
many who have lived on site for years. About 6 of our families are new 
within the past year. 

I signed up to cook on this date, noting that I'd make vegetarian chili, 
and asking a couple of others to join me on the team, to make other parts 
of the meal. Pat took on salad, and supervising her husband Don, who as 
an enthusiastic beginning cook volunteered to do cornbread. I had planned 
to just do a fruit bowl for dessert, but had time to do a cut-up fresh 
fruit salad. 

We charge $4 for adult meals, of which $3.50 is available for cooks' 
shopping. Many cooks have run over that amount, more or less voluntarily, 
in our initial anxieties not to run out of anything, and to have "our" 
meal be well received. Now we are getting better at estimating portions, 
and learning that the community can be happy with a fairly basic menu. On 
this meal, we came in a little under budget, which was good news. 

Menu: Vegetarian Chili with Corn (Laurel's Kitchen recipe x8, could have 
been x7); garnishes of shredded cheese, chopped green onions, even some 
cooked ground meat as a side dish to add in (first beef ever in the CH, 
but 2# of it got eaten up).
Mixed organic greens salad. 
Fresh warm cornbread; butter, honeybutter.
Fruit salad. 
I made a side platter of some extras for the little kids: hard boiled 
eggs, broccoli, carrots, banana chunks; juice. 

At 39 adults, 6 children, the dining room was pretty full. 
Our meal accountant sat near the dining room entrance, and people checked 
in with him, as he accepted payments (including optional advance 
payments) and noted how many meals each family charged.
At the end of the evening, he told the cooks what the $3.50 per adult 
diner added up to, and reimbursed us (up to that amount) in cash or 
credit. 

Serving went fairly quickly, and people gathered at tables of 4-10 
people. 

I was a bit concerned about clean up, since this was almost our largest 
group to date, but it went amazingly well. Probably half the people there 
participated in clean up: it was a beehive of dishwashing, pot scrubbing, 
table wiping, floor cleaning, food packaging, laundry. Like a swarm 
moving close together, but each person on their own track, and by 8 pm 
the CH was nearly empty, all clean and neat. There was even a committee 
meeting of about 8 people by the fireplace during clean up. 

[A footnote of thanks to Mary Kraus. We essentially programmed and 
designed (and contracted/built) our CH ourselves (by committee and 
consensus, really!), but early on Mary did some consulting with us and 
her kitchen design stayed through to the finished product, and it works 
SO well! You can't do better than getting Mary on board for CH design.] 

The kid room also got all cleaned up, and the garbage and compost taken 
out. Truly a case of many-hands-make-light-work. A team volunteered for 
the still-unfilled cook slot next Monday, and diners started signing up 
on the bulletin board. 

I had made the chili in odd bits of time over the course of about 5 days- 
prepping the beans, onions, peppers, etc. Cut up fruit the night before. 
So I only put in 2-3 hours before the meal, getting tables set up and 
arranged with daffodil bouquets and tea lights, doing last assembling, 
and enjoying hanging out with my salad-and-cornbread colleagues. Good 
music on the stereo while we were cooking. 

[After hearing almost every other group bemoan their dining room 
acoustics, we had made a number of choices during construction which seem 
to have paid off with tolerable sound levels. Acoustic tile on the whole 
ceiling, and a raised coffer area of about 12x12 in the center of the 
ceiling, to break up sound waves; ceiling 10 ft high elsewhere. ]

A little table for young children was a new experiment, and seems to have 
worked well for the 3-6 yr olds. Our new kids (2 and 5) acted totally at 
home, interacting with many of the adults, and keeping themselves busy 
with the other kids and play stuff. We've had two grandkids, of those 
same ages, visiting for two months, and they are now the experts, 
orienting the new kids. 

Cooking was a pleasant experience, and we got lots and lots of thanks and 
compliments. 
Now I can kick back and enjoy other teams' cooking for the next 6 Mondays!


Lynn Nadeau, RoseWind Cohousing
Port Townsend Washington (Victorian seaport, music, art, nature)
http://www.rosewind.org
http://www.ptguide.com

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