response 7 of 34:

Jan 18 03:45 UTC 2001

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....

response 9 of 34:

Jan 19 18:11 UTC 2001

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.

response 11 of 34:

Feb 9 19:23 UTC 2001

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.

response 13 of 34:

Feb 10 01:00 UTC 2001

"roux", pronounced "rue".

response 15 of 34:

May 23 14:12 UTC 2002

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.

response 17 of 34:

May 28 15:56 UTC 2002

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.

response 19 of 34:

May 29 21:34 UTC 2002

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.

response 21 of 34:

May 31 00:24 UTC 2002

A co-op house is sort of an urban commune.  Think 60's & hippies, though
things have evolved somewhat since then.

response 23 of 34:

May 31 06:09 UTC 2002

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.

response 25 of 34:

May 31 12:53 UTC 2002

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.

response 27 of 34:

Jun 2 20:02 UTC 2002

(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.

response 29 of 34:

Jun 3 07:10 UTC 2002

If it works well, wonderful.  That's why I was intrigued.  I don't 
think I'll see it out here, though.