Cooking Club--You should try it!

So, over the last few years I've been involved in a couple of cooking clubs. The one I'm in now is with some of my bestest girlfriends--Jennifer, Julie, and Carrie! I love it--even if we don't like every meal, it is great to try new things and be able to conveniently just pull something out of the freezer to cook for supper! AND it's especially good on the budget!

You should really try it! Here's how ours works (you can do it a lot of different ways):

We meet together every 4-6 weeks usually and pick 12 main dishes we'd like to have. We look through recipe books, use favorites from growing up/family, and use some that I've accumulated over several years of being in another cooking club (I have a notebook full of recipes). We try to make sure we have different kinds of meals i.e. not all beef or chicken, not too many Mexican, etc. We like a good variety!

After we get our list of 12, we each take 3 of them that we will be responsible for making for everyone. We give ourselves several days to get them all done. We go to Sams and one person buys all the meats (hamburger meat, chicken, etc) that we need for all the recipes. It seems to be cheapest that way. We just divide up the meats and take home how ever much we need for each of our meals. Then, we each go separately and buy all the ingredients we need to make our 3 meals. Each meal is doubled, tripled, or quadrupled based on the recipe. So, for a 9x13 casserole, we would double the recipe and each person would go home with an 8x8 dish. We just buy the cheapo foil pans and just use freezer bags for a lot of the meals, like the soups and stuff.

It typically will take each person about 3-5 hours of labor to make their 3 meals for everyone. Not too bad, I say, since you don't have to work for very long in the kitchen each night for the rest of the month! Most of us can get at least 2 meals out of most everything. When we're done fixing all the meals, we give each of the other 3 girls the 3 meals we made for each of them. So, we all go home with 12 different meals when it's all said and done.

We add up what everyone spent on all the food and divide by 4. Then we just pay back whoever bought all the meat at Sams cause they usually are the one who spent the most money. This last month, the average was about $85 per person for 12 dishes. We've done it cheaper and we've done it more expensive. It just depends on your meals.

Here are the meals we made this month (We made several soups this month due to the cold weather):

1. Cajun Chicken Pasta

2. Chicken & Stuffing

3. Chicken Chimichangas

4. Chicken Noodle Soup

5. Chicken Tortilla Soup

6. Crockpot Beef Stroganoff

7. Enchilada Pie

8. Huntington Chicken

9. Russian Chicken

10. Sour Cream Chicken Enchiladas

11. Southwestern Chili

12. Taco Soup

Just thought I'd put this on here for anyone out there that would be interested in doing something like this. It's a great way to feed your family!