12 hours of cooking...whew....

I have some pretty ambitious and amazing friends. Kelly and Kristy are always planning something...and luckily I get to be involved. One evening after a meeting, we were drinking coffee at a coffee shop (delaying going home as long as possible =) ), and the idea was brought up to have a "Day of Cooking". I was pretty excited as it was going to be scheduled before baby #4 was coming, and it meant that I would have a freezer full of food!! I can't say that I had much to do with the coordination of it all. I pretty much just agreed it was a good idea, and helped plan out what meals we should cook. We would meet at 9am, with as many crockpots, stockpots, knives, and plastic baggies...and wouldn't leave until we had cooked 5 different recipes. We also planned it on a day where we wouldn't have our kids until about 2pm...we could get it mostly done by then...right?!

So, the night before Kelly and Kristy got together to chop all the bell pepper, celery, and onion (the trinity as we call it down here)...I hear it took about 4 hours! I showed up the day of with a 6 qt crock pot and a huge stockpot. Kelly has this thing with organic meat, and luckily all the things we needed were on sale at Whole Foods that week! She had done most of the grocery shopping minus a few things we got from Walmart. They had started the chuck roast the night before and soaked the beans as well. Now...where do we begin?! Although there are probably lots of stories that could be documented over our next 12 hours, I will do my best to condense it down to what I really feel should be remembered from this day...

Cooking with friends is actually so fun! We visited and caught up on SO much stuff...I learned things about their families that I had no idea about, we shopped for furniture on craigslist (which we bought!), we listened to mellow music and rambled on and on about what artists we enjoyed, and of course compared cooking notes and styles from 3 different families. You learn a lot about people through cooking. Kelly is a "foodie". Kristy is more of a "wing it" kind of girl. We had lots of time to relax...and then 2pm came. Here is where the day got interesting. Once the house filled up with 9 little boys...we were then thrown into multi-tasking...yikes! We had a good flow going before that, but now the food was beginning to finish cooking and needed to cool before dividing it up amongst the families. So we begin to put the food out on the back patio. Unfortunately, this means the boys are now stuck inside. The husbands eventually show up for reinforcement. We feed the kids some of one of the meals we had just cooked, and the adults chow down on soup. Dads begin to load kids up and take them away...the mommas were pretty darn tired by this point. It wasn't until 9pm that we finished putting things into bags and into the freezer.

I feel I should mention (for sake of truly remembering this day), that I was almost unable to stand/walk/sit/crawl/dance the entire day! My back and pelvis were so incredibly achy, I was pretty much good for nothing =). (This meant I got "sit at the table and cut up raw meat duty"...it was the least I could do for all of their hard work, so I tried not to complain!)

So, here are the stats for the day:

-menu-
1. chuck roast BBQ
2. baked parmesan chicken
3. red beans with sausage
4. potato and corn chowder
5. broilermaker chili
6. chocolate mousse (leave to the preggo to be in charge of the dessert)

-meals-
including feeding the kids and adults on the day of...we made enough for each family to get 13 meals!

-funds-
even with Kelly's need for chickens who were pampered and cows who were massaged before slaughter (aka whole foods), we figured that each meal cost less than $10!

-time-
4 hours of chopping & 12 hours of cooking and storing

Don't think we will make this a totally regular occurrence, but what a fun day of hanging with two of my favorite people. Bon Apetit!