Cooking with Friends

It’s no secret that Miss Menu loves to cook. I love to put ingredients together, to research new recipes, and most of all, I love to eat. But cooking on your own can become a bit. . . tiresome. One of my favorite pastimes is cooking with friends. And although my favorite cooking partner (Cookbook Queen) lives an hour away, we are still known to dedicate entire phone conversations to recipe discussions, menu sharing and tip giving.

I suppose the affinity for cooking with friends must be in my genes. Mother Menu and her good friend of umpteen years started a cooking-together tradition years ago. Every month, they would take turns investigating recipes, meeting at one house or another to experiment with those foods that they might be hesitant to try on their own.

Just recently, my mom’s friend unearthed a somewhat historic document: the list of menus they made from 1990-1996 (although they started cooking together long before that time). And oh, what a list it is!

January 1990 found the friends fixing fried mozzarella “sandwiches” stuffed with prosciutto and pine nuts, mushroom-almond paté, chestnut cake with chocolate whipped cream frosting and rolled cylinder almond tuile cookies. April 1991 featured an eclectic menu of Cornish game hens with five-spice seasoning, pot sticker dumplings, curry-spiced couscous and fried green tomatillos.

Of course, not every menu was a sure fire hit. Both women agree that the biggest failure over the years was the homemade ravioli, which they couldn’t roll thin enough. And the homemade mincemeat was difficult to make and tasted no better than what you could buy in a jar. But I remember, as one of the family recipe tasters, that they experienced more hits than misses.

There’s something about cooking with others that is eminently satisfying. The exchange of feedback, the collaboration of cooks, and the cumulative experience of fellow home chefs results in a more complete cooking experience. Because nobody cooks in a bubble. Before I make a dish, I consult numerous voices: my favorite cookbooks and popular Web sites usually lend their electronic expertise. And I never find myself preparing a big meal for guests without picking up the phone to call mom. Not to mention an inevitable consultation with Cookbook Queen. A meal becomes that much more special when the knowledge and experience of friends and family help inform and shape the flavors.

Plus, cooking with friends usually results in better memories than cooking alone. During my fourth year in college, I convinced a roommate to help me make gnocchi, the delectable potato dumplings. I had none of the equipment required for the process (namely, a food mill or potato ricer, which turns the dense potato into a light and fluffy mixture suitable for the dumpling “batter’), but that didn’t deter me. The end result was brick-like dumplings that contained whole chunks of barely-cooked potato, not to mention a plastic cutting board that we melted to the burner of our electric stove.

Whether the result is a phenomenal meal or a fantastic story, cooking with friends is always a recipe for a good time.