Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: meal tracking- clean up

[Lynn Nadeau / Maraiah (welcome]

On Mar 15, 2014, at 3:16 AM, cohousing-l-request [at] cohousing.org wrote:

>  I see that RoseWind gets by with 2 cooks - for how many diners,
> usually?

We usually have about 24 adults and a few kids. Cooking is most often done by 
two, sometimes one, occasionally three. I'm one who sometimes does it solo: 
Ahead of time, I might shop, and make and freeze soup/chili/ or prepped 
ingredients, premix dry ingredients for something like cornbread. Then I work 
on salad and dessert, as well as heating/baking, on the "day of". I usually 
also set up the tables with tablecloths, tea lights, salt & pepper. If I have a 
second cook, they might do the salad and/or dessert. 

Clean-up for cooked meals and for potluck is not by sign-up, but "everybody". 
In practice, this might see several people taking turns loading dishes and 
running them through the counter-top restaurant-type dishwasher/sanitizer, 
another couple taking the clean dishes from the racks and putting them away. 
(We keep the Corelle dishes on a Rubbermaid roll-y cart, which gets wheeled 
into the kitchen for loading, then returned to the beginning of the serving 
line for meals. Although techically one is supposed to let everything air dry, 
we don't have space for that, so we have a big stack of freshly laundered white 
cotton dishtowels. A quick whisk on a hot Corelle dish and it's dry.) We don't 
have community laundry facilities at the common house, but do have a washer for 
dish towels, cloth napkins, cleaning cloths etc. 

Another person at the pot sink. Others collecting stray dishes, wiping down 
tables, emptying serving dishes of leftovers for take-home. (A drawer under the 
serving counter has plastic yogurt containers etc for taking leftovers.) 
Towards the end, some sweeping, compost out to the bucket on the back porch, 
trash to back porch can. We have no problem getting folks to pitch in. With 6-8 
people in motion, it doesn't take long and is often a time of cheerful 
camaraderie.

Maraiah Lynn Nadeau
RoseWind Cohousing, Port Townsend WA
www.rosewind.org
where yesterday I had fresh carrot juice for supper-- amazingly, we still have 
carrots from the past year, ready for the pulling.