34 new of 34 responses total.
Depends...is this helping out in an institutional kitchen (full of huge pot, huge pans, huge ovens, etc.), making *lots* of an item or two (say, 8 dozen cookies & 8 dozen rolls) with normal-size equipment, or what? If there's a commercial dish washing machine, make sure that you either never touch it, or know *everything* about operating it. In-between is dangerous.
Ditto what Dr. Chocolate said...
There is, in fact a commercial dish washing machine. There's a whole industrial kitchen, including a wok that probably weighs more than I do and is over a yard across. I've been noticing that most people just try to cook their favorite recipes multiplied by 10. Usually it turns out okay, but not fantastic.
Find a copy of The Findhorn Cookbook. Vegetarian, cooperative, natural foods. All recipes used for years in the Findhorn community in Scotland. All recipes in 10, 25, 50 and 100 person quantities. Directions that explain what differences in procedure you need when cooking different sizes. Also lots of kitchen management and organizing information to make cooking in larger quantities efficient for the work force. Buying, storing, making best use of, etc. Designed especially for novices cooking large meals in cooperative settings. Author: Friedlander, Barbara
Also remember "Large Pot Favorites" - Soups, spagetti, chili. Plain tossed salads help fill open spots. And never forget that you cannot please everybody every night.....so don't drive yourself crazy by trying to.
Bread with the soups.
Ooh....that Barbara Friedlander book sounds fantastic. (And where do I recognize her name from? Has she written other books?) It turns out I may have less leeway to make stuff I want to make anyway -- food buying and menu-making are the jobs of the Food Steward. I was due to cook on Monday and I'd gotten all revved up to do a pasta sauce that I thought would be easy to multiply when she turned up and handed me a bunch of vegetables and a bunch of boxes of croissants and told me to start making sandwiches. So, convenient in the short run, since I don't have to experiment with recipes. Annoying in the long run, I'm guessing, since I don't particularly like most of the recipes in the Official House Cookbook that I've tasted so far, and I prefer to find my own recipes anyway. Of course, she might just have taken over command for that one night to help out the new guy....
Is this coop supposed to be saving the students money? Croissants?! I recall when cooking for my coop dorm that I would make my own bread, or ravioli. Jim suggests a salad bar for those who want bread and raw vegetables. (By making ravioli I meant starting with flour - never again, at least for 40 people. My grandfather the baker helped.) We had contests to see who could cook the cheapest meal, as the costs were billed directly to the eaters. There was a 50 cent/meal limit (1972 - it would be at least five times that now) and I won at 18 cents - soybeans and wild vegetable soup and bread. Time consuming, though. What is it costing nowadays to eat in a coop? A dorm?
Yeah, that was my reaction. People here don't seem to be quite clear on why they're living here. Everybody wants to save money etc., but people aren't willing to put in all that much work. The co-ops are still cheaper than the dorms, but the dorms have probably also gotten more luxurious since the 60s and 70s. The croissants were especially ridiculous because the co-op didn't want to spend too much money on them, so they get cheap ones that more or less just taste like bread and butter; only croissants are worse than bread and butter for making sandwiches, because they're crescent-shaped instead of square and everything falls off. I don't think I could make my own bread at meals here without buying at least my own yeast, and probably my own flour too. We have white cake flour in the pantry, a few boxes of cake mix, and _maybe_ baking soda.
Wooden Spoon Used Books downtown has a book there called "Food For Fifty". That might not be a bad idea.....
Finally, some things that are easier on a large scale than on a small scale: Cheese sauces. Melting flour into butter -- there's a French word for this, I know it -- drives me crazy normally. Either the butter cooks away, or I burn the flour, or I don't have the heat up high enough and it all just sits there. But when you're making casserole for 30 people and you're melting a whole vat of butter, the process seems a lot more stable. Rice. If you're cooking one serving of rice, and some of it burns to the pot, you've lost half your rice. If you're cooking a vat of rice, and some of it burns to the pot, you've lost a serving or two total, but it's a much smaller percentage. Vat. You get to use the word "vat" a lot. I like vats. Vat vat vat vat vat.
Its called a roue (at least I think that how it is spelled), pronounced rue.
"roux", pronounced "rue".
There is an easy way to make a roux. Start with equal parts of butter and flour. Usually all that's needed is 2 tbs of each. Melt the butter over a low fire, add the flour and whisk. Rouxs, according to several sources have varying degrees of thickening power. As a rule, the darker the roux, the less it will thicken. Add 2 c of milk to the roux, and you'll have what is known as bechamel sauce. Add cheese, and you have a perfect cheese sauce. Add the milk in gradual stages or you'll be in lump city. As you add the milk, keep the whisking up. When it comes to the boil, season, and add your cheese or whatever. This is not rocket science. That should be 2 tablespoons of each, BTW
resurrect the item! I just moved into a coop, and am thinking about being a cook for the fall. We have much of the opposite problem: we have no official recipes, the people who cook tell the house Buyer what to buy, but people have been getting less and less creative. There was even an official spaghetti night last semester! I want to do better, but really don't know of anything. The Findhorn cookbook looked interesting... where do I find it? It wasn't listed on Amazon.com.
I'm back n town, but busy until Wed or Thurs of next week. I'd be glad to let you two look at and copy important parts of Findhorn. Reference The Findhorn Cookbook, An Approach to Cooking with Consciousness Barbara Friedlander copyright 1976 ISBN 0-448-11893-9 (paperback) ISBN 0-448-12570-6 (hardback) Recipes are designed for 10, 25, 50, and 100 servings. More importantly, there is a _lot_ of information about how to organize the kitchen and work crews. The recipes are not vegan (honey, eggs, milk, and cheese are sometimes included) but they are vegetarian. Email me and we can get together.
At Luther house, I was thinking about posting a list of cooking tips in the kitchen -- things like which spices go with what sort of food, or reminders about how to put a menu together. The house I'm at now is a lot more enthusiastic about food, and that doesn't really seem to be necessary. Still, we keep a short list of pointers on the fridge. That might help in your house. Do you have a house collection of cookbooks? At Lester, we've got guff copies of the Moosewood series, Cookbook for a Small World, and a few others. We'd be pretty much lost without those. The Findhorn cookbook sounds really good. There's one called "Moosewood Cooks for a Crowd" that sounds similar.
What was Luther House?
Luther's the co-op I lived in for the past year or so. Now I'm at Lester. They're both co-op houses in Ann Arbor.
I'm sorry-- I am so confused and I feel so.. um.. rural.. what's a co- op house?
A co-op house is sort of an urban commune. Think 60's & hippies, though things have evolved somewhat since then.
Interesting. Evolved like how? (I'm not a hippie.)
Well, never having lived in a commune... The members are all partial owners of the house. They all pay dues that go towards the upkeep of the house, utilities, and food. Anything that is bought with dues is shared (or at least, available to be shared) by the whole house. The house is, in theory, run democratically. In practice, it's an oligarchy run by the couple of people who can be bothered to deal with that sort of thing. All the members are assigned a job, or a few jobs, to help keep the house running. I think what's evolved is the attitude behind the co-ops, not the way they run. They're less of a Vehicle for Social Transformation these days, and more of a place to live, or so I'm told.
It really does sound like an interesting concept, but sounds a little more like a glorified roommate thing to me. Don't think I'd see any such thing out here.
The coop concept goes back quite a ways in rural America, and often just for the practical purpose of sharing big investments. My grandpa the wheat farmer was part of a coop.
The UM Housing coops were set up in the 1930s, long before the hippies came along. Coops, in general, are an alternative business management system. Under the capitalism model the capital for the enterprise is provided by Party A (investors) so that party B (managers) can use it to hire party C (workers) and buy machinery to make products that are then sold to party D (consumers). This business system is codified in US corporation laws. Under the cooperative model, the parties are combined. For example, in the food coop, the owners of the coop are Party A, C, and D. Originally they were also Party B, but when the coop got to be a large business (we do over $4 million a year in sales), we hired full-time managers and some full time workers. This business system is codified in US cooperative law. You may not call your business a coop unless it meets the legal requirements of the coop. Rural electric coops were an early example of a consumer coop, where the consumers of a service or product got together to provide it for themselves. Credit unions are money coops, where the consumers are also the owners of the bank. Wheat, dairy, and other farm product coops are marketing coops, where the members provide the capital to market their crops as a single business, rather than individually. I think Land O' Lakes dairies are a coop. Anyway, it is an alternative business system, codified in US law, so that the business is owned by the consumers of the service or product. Part of the law is that only people who meet certain criteria can join the cooperative. In housing coops, you buy a share of the coop, which makes you a part owner of the house or houses owned by the cooperative. Some coops are single family units (in Ann Arbor there are 20 or 30 of them) others, owned by the UM Housing Coop, are shared living space, whose membership is limited to students at the UM. In this coop, the work to maintain and feed the residence and residents is mostly done by the owners themselves.
(Nitpick: It's the Ann Arbor Inter-Cooperative Council now, membership is open to any students at Washtenaw County schools, and non-students can move in if the house votes to allow it.) If you're not interested in socialism or alternative business models, then yeah, it's a glorified roommate setup. But it's a glorified roommate setup that seems to work pretty well. When I shared an apartment with four other people, nothing got done and we were at each others' throats the whole time. I lived in a house of 45 people last year, and it ran ten times as smoothly.
Thanks for the nit-picks. I didn't know those things.
If it works well, wonderful. That's why I was intrigued. I don't think I'll see it out here, though.
Actually, REI (Recreational Equipment ?I) is one of the country's biggest coops. As I remember, they got their start in Oregon or Washington.
A quick web search turned up the Kindermeadow Housing Co-Op in Olympia, the Sherwood Cooperative in Seattle, a few co-op houses at Oregon State University, a Student's Cooperative Association in Eugene, and a bunch of houses in Portland. Now, these are all probably on the wrong side of the Cascades from you, right? I'm not finding any student housing co-ops on the east side of Washington or Oregon, or any at all in Idaho. Still, as Colleen points out, there are definitely other sorts of co-operative businesses in your neck of the woods. Quick, someone get me off my soapbox...
resp:30 that sounds about right.. resp:31 yep, Dan, all on the west side. But of course, there are a number of farmer co-op stores. That's it, though. Pretty basic. No herbs, spices, etc.-- just mostly a Joe Conservative Farmer deal.
Some techniques are really good for scaling (sous vide, roasting). Measure by mass, not volume, as you can scale more easily, and can just retare to add the next ingredient. Use techniques that offer a wide margin for error (sous vide, braising, etc), since your cadence will be different to cook for 40 versus ooking for 4. Fussy dishes and proper plating go out the window unless you have a crew. Just serve family style. Casseroles scale nearly linearly, and are always appreciated.
Soups stretch easily too.
You have several choices: