I've wanted to start a supper club for the past several months, but it's a big time and resource strain. I cook several times a week and usually I make waaay too much food. The first night it starts out as the most amazing thing I've ever eaten and by the end of the week, I never want to eat (fill in the blank) evAr again. So why not share those extras with some friends?
Here's how this community supported home cooking works with four people:
1) I make my overly large dinner that would serve a family of four with leftovers.
2) I eat dinner from it.
3) Those extra three portions? I pack those up in community tupperware and bring them (in my case) to school the next day to give to the other three people doing this.
4) Of the other three people, one also brings their leftovers to pass out. We hide them in the refrigerators in the offices because sometimes the maintenance people (we think) steal food from the community fridges.
5) I take home dinner for that night plus two more nights that I don't have to cook from scratch and so do three other people.
6) The next week, the two people that did not bring dishes will bring something and the two people who did, can sit back, relax, and get amazing food for which they didn't have to lift a finger.
My thoughts are that this would happen every other week. This averages to having a home cooked meal two times each week. This should work, in principle, because everyone cooks and no one needs to host a potluck every two weeks. The only "cost of entry" is purchasing some cheap tupperware that you don't mind sharing with the other people.
The other side of that is that it takes the social aspect out of cooking for others, but to remedy that every 6 weeks we'd all go to one person's house, bring our contribution and eat their contribution that night. Everyone who attended would get to leave with two more dinners worth of food and the person who hosted now gets three more dinners. This amounts to hosting a super low key dinner party every ~6 months.
Obviously the dinners would have to consist of meals that re-heat well, but a lot of food does. Off the top of my head I'm thinking of really good casseroles, Indian curries, and yummy stews. The potluck nights would allow everyone to make something that doesn't *have* to transport and reheat easily (like, say, pizza). My thought is that four family units is the perfect size (so Colby and I are one unit) because then you don't have to eat super old leftovers, but you still have interesting food waiting for you.
