Cooking For the Community

There are many differences between living with roommates and living in an intentional community.  In general living in a community is a lot more like living with family.  Roomates are friends that you live with and community is an adopted family that you take into your life and become apart of.  Its a place to grow and learn about yourself and others.  You are not nessearly best friends with everyone in your community but thats ok, living with all different types of people is what makes a person grow and learn the most.  I got very lucky with my amazing community! We are all very different people but our differences are what makes us such a fun group.  We really have no problem speaking our mind (so there is lots of joking that goes on) and we are real easy going (so sometimes just sitting on the couch watching a movie or a game is exactly what we enjoy doing together).  Community has its challanges as well.  Having to discuss everything from how much toilet paper we use to the amount of cheese we buy can get very tedious.  In the end though it makes everyone happy becasue we have to come to a lot of agreements and compromises. 

One of my favorite things about living in a community is dinner time! We do our grocery shopping on the weekends.  After deciding what meals everyone wants to cook we make a list of exactly what we need, hop on the bus, and shop.  At least 3 of us go so that we can carry it all home.  We spend an average of $75 dollars a week. Then we decided who is making their meal when.  Each meal has a chef and assistant chef.  Then the 3 cleaner-uppers (makes clean up real fast).  Dinner is a community event for us every night of the week.  We cook togeter, pray together, and eat together.  On occation someone is missing or something comes up or we have a different dinner event to go to.  But if we are all home than we are all eating dinner together.  Its amazing the value of a meal together.  The conversation does not have to be deep, it does not have to be formal, and most of the time elbows end up on the table (hehe).  The importance comes from sitting together and enjoying eachothers company.  We mostly talk about our days and then wonder on to different subjects after everyone has vented or laughed about the days happenings.

We make $75 dollars go pretty far. Yesterday i made a cauliflower curry and rice dish.  We have had the beef bowl recipe, from my little black book or recipies.  Black bean burgers.  Tuna pasta medly.  Veggy noodle soup.  Ster fry.  Apple sauce. Cinimin buns. Cookies.  And more. We get very creative and my cook books (on a budget) that i got for Christmas last year have been a BIG help. I think the favorite dish i have done so far is Breakfast for dinner :)  I do a vegiterian version and a bacon lovers version (i think you all can figure out the difference and of course all of the bacon fat is used in the bacon lovers version haha).  I have never been much of a cook (as most of you know) but something about cooking for my community and having the support of the people i am feeding gives me the energy and excitment to make goooood food.   

This new love of cooking does not nessesaraly mean that i will be jumping on the opportunity when i am back in CA, haha, but i do not doubt that i will learn a lot this year and become a much better cook ;)