Leftmost Blog

Sometime in January or February, my friends Thomas and Marissa and myself had a brief, not-entirely-serious discussion about making a decent dinner once a week. Toward the end of February, it came up again and we determined to do it for real. The first week, Tom took charge and we made steak au poivre with buttered red potatoes. It was a success and that settled it.

Since February 28th, we have made dinner at least every Friday. A few weeks were exceptions, when Tom or Tom and Marissa were out of town and for Tom's birthday. From February until June, we had an uninterrupted stretch of fifteen weeks. We didn't even break for the week before or after finals. The system was as so: every week, one person would take charge, deciding what we'd make and directing in the kitchen. We rotated so that everyone had their own weeks. The whole thing worked out beautifully.

We all made an attempt to expand our repertoire of recipes and of kitchen skills. We all had a couple weeks where we made something familiar to us but it was usually a recipe the others hadn't used before. Though there were a few times that things went wrong in not-nice ways, not a single week ended in a bona fide disaster. Everything was edible, everything was delicious. And even when things got expensive, the cost was split three ways. I don't think anything ever cost more than $12 a person and when it was that much, there were always copious leftovers. This week, our eighteenth and (for the next nine months) final, was mine. I made pasties at a cost of $12 a person. Each pasty was large enough that no one ate more than one. The recipe claimed to make twelve but the filling portion of the recipe is easily large enough to make another six. There will be leftovers for a while.

For a couple of months, I've been tossing around the idea of compiling all of the recipes we've used and making a small recipe book to give to family and friends (and to use ourselves). I'd like us to talk about our reasons for choosing the recipes we did. And of course, we now have our own notes to add to the recipes. (Make only two thirds the amount of filling the recipe calls for. And feel free to halve it.)

I think the most interesting thing about the adventure has been the reactions I get when I talk about it with others. I think a lot of people are surprised that three twenty-something college students are willing to get together once a week, no matter how tired or busy they are, and sit down to a good dinner they've made themselves. And that we've been so willing to try new things. Before we started, we were much more heavily reliant on eating out or a few recipes without much effort, thought or originality. I think we were hardly alone in that. Now though, we're much more likely to pool our resources and make something nice, even if it isn't complicated.