Monday, March 28, 2016: First community dinner

Today was the first of our organized community meals in the common house, prepared and served by our members. It was a beautiful, sunny day and we could glimpse the mountains through the lounge windows. Almost 40 Vancouver Cohousers sat down for a delicious dinner of red lentil dahl, naan bread, rice and salad.

It was a lovely opportunity to chat with folks who share this amazing place. At my table, we caught up with how settling in is progressing and discussed how we had first become involved in the project. On the other  hand, Margot (pictured below) was more focused on her food.

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We’ve been organized into crews of three to shop, chop, cook and clean for dinners on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and a weekend brunch. This evening, Nicole sent an email on behalf of the fellow members of her crew, Britta and Barry, with some lessons and insights from the first meal.

The first thing is to look at larger teams. “There were five of us (thanks for bringing friends Britta!!) cooking/setting up nonstop for two hours and I started prepping the meal at 2 pm,” Nicole wrote. “So the teams may want to plan to start earlier or have more people per team. Or just have waiting diners to help set up. This is assuming of course that you will have as many people at your meal that we had tonight. Smaller groups will obviously take less time.”

There has been a lot of discussion about the price of the common meals. “Tonight’s meal was one of the cheapest that you could make and at $5 a head we made just over $35 above our cost,” Nicole said. Costs will come down once we finish setting up our pantry and buy supplies in bulk. Clearly, our common meals are a work in progress.

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