Want To Cook Together?

Recently Kristine of the excellent blog Waiting for Kids asked if I wanted to start an online cooking group for moms. I was immediately intrigued by the idea, and after a few e-mails back and forth sharing ideas, we came up with the following approach.

We’d form a group of like-minded folks that want to cook new, interesting things and test them out on their kids (or if they don’t yet have kids, someone’s kids…i.e. nieces, nephews, godchildren, the neighbor's kids -- really any willing tot will do), honestly sharing the results with the rest of the group. It's key that we’re totally candid about how the dish went off with the kiddos…I know it’s tempting (trust me) to only blog out our culinary “hits”, but understanding the misses and why they didn’t work is key.

The group would cook around a specific, pre-determined ingredient or type of dish each week and can use a new recipe, something of our own creation, something from a magazine…no restrictions there, except that it has to be something you haven't made before.

Each member of the group would post their recipe and results on Monday, (that way folks can work the good ones into their weekly meal planning) and (this one is especially important to me) try to use as many local, organic ingredients as possible in the recipe. Also I’d like to try and focus half of the recipes on vegetarian options since there are so many good reasons, especially environmental, to keep our meat consumption limited.

Now granted every kid has different tastes, so there are no "one size fits all" recipes, but my hope is that a few recipes will surface each week that feel like sure fire winners, and at the end of the experiment, we can create a compilation of the “kid-approved” ones. My dream is to cobble together a little cookbook that we could sell online and donate any profits to the groups trying to fix the abysmal school lunch program in America!

I’d like to start on Monday, August 3rd and go for 10 weeks. I’ll link to everyone’s blog who is participating.

Right now, I’m thinking the weekly “plan” could go something like this:

Week one – Vegetarian
Week two – Poultry
Week three – Pork
Week four – Vegetarian
Week five – Dessert
Week six – Seafood
Week seven – Vegetarian
Week eight – Red Meat
Week nine -- Casserole (no ingredient requirement)
Week ten – Vegetarian

So what do you think? Who’s in?