May menu: Hints and other tales

On May 29, 2009 by Tricia

Well, since I have already confessed that I didn’t do the May menu cooking, you are probably wondering how it is that I was able to do a recap. This recap comes to you from Misty Newsome, a reader who graciously pointed out some things from May’s menu. I hope that you find her experience helpful as you approach your cooking day. Hi!!  My name is Misty Newsome from The Newsome Family Blog.  I found Once A Month Mom from Andrea at Mommy Snacks on Twitter.  I’ve been reading it for a few months, and at the beginning of April sent a friend of mine an email asking if she’d be interested in doing this with me.  I knew our kids got along great and our husbands would LOVE the idea of new recipes, so I figured let’s give this a shot.  I’ve been doing batch cooking on and off for years, but was always too intimidated to do an actual once a month cooking day.  She said yes, so we started gathering our ingredients.  Our first day went really well for a first try!  My husband took the day off and watched all 4 kids (ages 3, 2, 1 and 7 months) until he had some help when friend’s hubby got home at noon.  I actually still have some recipes left that I am giving to new moms at our church. So we spent our Memorial Day starting our 2nd ever BIG DAY of cooking.  We also had a 3rd person join us for the first time.  Two of our friends had been interested in this, and so they did the May menu last Wednesday.  However, she has 4 kids, and knew she wanted to make more of some recipes, so we said bring your food and come on!!  Plus, we thought we’d get done faster with 3 people!  (Our first day was start to finish 8:30 am – 3 pm)  We were wrong….

The day started off well.  My girlfriends had all brought over their chicken and crock pots the night before, and one of their families came over to hang out and play cards.  They helped clean our kitchen (I HAVE to have a clean kitchen to start) and then after they left, I thought I’d do us all a favor and separate all the ingredients by dish. It ended up being a big pain, and I would advise to NOT do that. Just have them all on one table instead of all spread out.  I’m kind of anal and an uber-organizer and I thought it would help, but it just made us all confused and unable to find things easily.  It might work if there are only 2 and you are going in order, but I’ll get to that later.

We did not chop the night before, so my two girlfriends got to chopping, while I got the crock pots going with meat balls and chowder.  Putting the crock pots out of the kitchen really helped as this saved us much counter space! Oh, had the early morning high stayed we may have finished by 1!!  After that, there was very little organization.  What we probably should have done is have one person be A, one person be B and then the third clean and help.  What we did was “what are y’all working on” and then pick something next on the list.  Which was somewhat good, except I feel like I had to clean the whole time, and poor Valerie, my pregnant friend, ended up doing a lot of the cooking, with lots of bloody meat!

We were on a big time roll, and around 10:30 declared to our husbands (who had all 8 kids elsewhere, GREAT by the way!) we’d probably be done by 1.  The problem is, we were so excited we were knocking things out, that we slowed way down. That and we just overall started taking longer.  Friend’s husband said he’d bring us lunch that day, and of course we needed a couple things from the store so he brought those and brought us lunch, and we took a very leisurely one! 🙂 Here’s Mindy working on the hot dog croissants, which my husband has tried and really likes.  Hubby even stepped in to help at the end….we were TIRED.  It ended up more like 4 before we were all done.  But my kitchen was spotless!!  So here are the top 10 things we learned:

1. The night before when you as hostess are getting all organized and excited, do not proceed to text your pregnant friend way past midnight just to remind her of things.  When she stops texting back, it’s time to put the phone down!
2. When you’ve talked about using your friends fresh (not frozen) ground beef for the hamburgers and your previously frozen now thawed ground beef for the recipes that it needs to be browned, actually REMEMBER before you start browning all the fresh beef.
3. Always buy more tortillas.  It seems we always have lots more innards (that doesn’t sound appetizing) than tortillas to put them in.
4. Make sure everyone has read through all the recipes the night before.  We kept asking our friend who had done the cooking day and she was busy with her own recipe and couldn’t remember!
5. When you read through all the recipes the night before, you’ll catch some of the things that need to be chopped but aren’t on the instructions, i.e. the strawberries and ginger (if you go that route, we just used ground ginger).
6. Don’t just eyeball the chicken broth, I used WAY too much in the chowder!
7. Don’t make your pregnant with her 3rd baby friend do all the raw meat stuff.   Yuck, sorry Val!!
8. Don’t let your husbands come at the end and taunt you without putting them to work!
9. Even though you’ll get tired, remember ALL THOSE DAYS YOU DON’T HAVE TO COOK and it will get you through the end of the day.  My friend who did the day with our other friend before us says wine helps too!
10. Don’t offer to do the onceamonthmeals.com recap when you will be out of town the day after you cook, on a school field trip the next day, and then just at church working on VBS stuff the next day.  Sorry this is so late guys!! 🙂

How did your May cooking day go? Make sure to share your stories here.