Now that our OAMC day is over, I can take a deep breath and exhale a sigh of relief! I'm happy to report that all eight women went home with 12-16 meals to feed their families yesterday, all of which took less than 5 hours to prep, assemble, and clean.
Suzanne, Shelley and Teresa cavort in the kitchen...it was all work...and some chit-chat, too!
Ginger and Tracy face off at the cooking stations...we used every available inch of space!
I was really intimidated by the thought of eight people in one kitchen, but with all the preparation and organization, there was plenty to do. Having all those hands turned out to be a blessing!
Even with a nice big kitchen, the dining room table was pressed into service as a prep station.
Our final cost per family came out to about $72...a bargain for so many great meals!
This is only a small portion of our pantry items.
We tried the Sausage-Stuffed Shells last night and they were absolutely delicious! The Loaded Spuds were a hit with Teresa's family. Both of these recipes are from You've Got It Made, by Diane Phillips.
(I have a confession to make...I burned the first batch of 40 potatoes. That was my only do-ahead job - well, besides planning and coordinating everything - and I botched it! We had to buy 40 more potatoes on C-Day...added cost: $16 on the total bill...I was completely prepared to foot the bill, but these awesome ladies are so gracious, they insisted it be added to the total. They are so classy!)
Our saucy lady, Rachel, whips up a rue...well, about 4 batches of rue. Then she took on the parmesan cream sauce for the shells. She swears standing over the stove is great because she gets a nice steam facial...I'm glad someone enjoys it!I can't wait to do it again, ladies! (Especially since I don't have to coordinate it next time!!!)
For the list of meals we prepared, see my previous post "OAMC: What IS that?"
4 comments:
how fun to see you all! I want to visit!
I would love a photocopy of the recipes if you have time and are willing to share. I'm sooooo impressed with your organizational skills.
I've often thought of doing this. I do it on my own every two weeks or so, but it takes me longer (of course). Do you have any tips or the name of a book I can check, on how to cordinate and some recipes. One draw back is that we are pretty totally from scratch so I get caugt up in using premade soups etc. Any ideas would be appreciated!
http://4sweetsisters.blogspot.com/
We don't use any books to coordinate this, but I'm sure there are some available. We just get together ahead of time to pick our 12 recipes. Then we get them all on the computer. We try to pick things that have cross-over ingredients so we're not buying 10,000 different things on shopping day.
Future plan: My amazing, computer-geek husband is creating a database that will automatically generate a combined shopping list for all the recipes we choose from the database. We will be able to search for recipes based on different criteria...like chicken, if it happens to be on sale.
We choose a coordinator to handle the organizing (someone different each time to share the burden) and then several of us go shopping for ingredients. Dry goods and non-refrigerated items can be purchased in advance when they go on sale. Meats that will be cooked ahead can be purchased and frozen. For example, if a recipe calls for cooked, chopped chicken, we can buy those whole chickens when on sale and freeze them until we're ready for them. We try not to freeze meat more than once after cooking.
As coordinator of our last OAMC day, I printed out each recipe (with the ingredient multiplications from the excel spreadsheet we used to shop with). Excel is great, since you can create columns for ingredient, amount, recipe name, number of times you will multiply the recipe, and even a column for noting the name of the person who will bring that ingredient from home (last time we needed 5 Tbsp. of brown sugar, so someone brought it from home).
As far as recipes go, we get them from a variety of places. This last time, we used several from the FlyLady website (Red River Chicken, Apple Chicken/Pork Chops, Chicken Tostados). They've all been great. I also like the You've Got It Made cookbook by Diane Phillips. She gives a Quick Marinara recipe that is made from canned tomatoes and some fresh ingredients...really tasty! We avoid recipes that require canned cream soups...they tend to be fattening, salty, and usually have MSG.
I could go on and on about this, but I will leave it and you can email me at mommamuse (at) gmail.com if you want to know more! ;)
Donna
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