Cook for a night, eat for a week

RICHMOND - Tuesday night is when Ginny Bowie really cooks.

Take last Tuesday, for example.

She sautéed 32 golden-brown tuna cakes, prepared four casseroles of shoepeg corn and diced tomatoes, and tossed a Caesar salad in a bowl the size of a small washtub.

It was a lot of work, but there was a payoff:

She was done for the week.

“I’m basically cooking one night for the whole week,“ she said.

Bowie, a senior vice president for a major financial securities firm and mother of three, has participated for more than two decades in cooking co-ops, in which members share meals with one another. She’s currently in a co-op with three other Hanover families. Each provides dinners one night a week, typically cooking the night before, refrigerating the meal and delivering it the next day.

Passionate about the concept and about family mealtime, Bowie has produced a DVD, “If It’s Tuesday, It’s My Night 2 Cook,“ to provide tips about cooking co-ops and to encourage others to try it. She also has set up a Web site: http://mynight2cook.com.

“I believe the dinner hour needs to be a celebration, not a time to dread answering the question: What’s for dinner?“ said Bowie, whose first cooking co-op was in Charlotte, N.C. She started another when she moved to Richmond.

“I have found in my 21 years of cooking co-op that food is the WD-40 to get conversations going on a review of the day: what was learned; what went right, wrong; time to share values, articles, opinions. I believe four or more family mealtimes a week is essential to the stability of the family.

“Cooking co-op helps people like me . . . enjoy dinnertime so much more than if I were trying to plan and cook always.“

Cooking co-ops—sometimes called supper swaps—are not a new concept. They have popped up across the country where groups of people have banded together to try to save time, money and their sanity around what’s sometimes known as the “arsenic hour,“ the time just before dinner when children are cranky, parents are frantic and the food can’t get on the table fast enough.

There is much to recommend cooking co-ops. Participants say it not only saves them time in the kitchen but also reduces trips to the grocery store. When they cook, they prepare large quantities, but they don’t have to stew over what to prepare for dinner every night—or wave the white flag and buy something in a bag from a fast-food drive-in window when they’re short on time.

The trick is finding like-minded families or individuals who are willing to join a co-op—and then keeping it together. People move, families evolve, tastes change. Bowie is on her eighth co-op.

Her current co-op, which provides meals for one another Monday-Thursday, has been together several years. She plays tennis with Lisa Adkins, who works with Ivy Sager, who is a neighbor of the Melchor family.

They all live in Hanover, but not in the same neighborhood. Meals are delivered Pony Expresslike, handed off at work or dropped off at homes.

It works.

“As a family, we’re able to have a family mealtime without a whole lot of effort,“ said Sager, director of the Department of Community Resources for Hanover County. She and her husband, Greg, have three children: Anna, 11, Shea, 7, and Todd, 4.

“When you’ve got a ready-to-heat-up meal, it’s just as easy as fast food or frozen convenience food. We’re not choosing fast food every other night because it’s easier. I think my children are eating healthier, and they’re certainly being exposed to a larger variety of food. My 7-year-old eats a curry chicken dish that is [in] the [meal] rotation and loves it. How many 7-year-olds eat curry chicken?“

Menus are agreed on and scheduled months in advance. But with upward of two dozen people in the co-op, not everyone is going to like every dish.

“If one of my kids has an ‘issue’ with the main course, I tell them to try it first, then they can have something else that we have on hand at home if they refuse to finish the dinner item,“ said Adkins, program coordinator for the Hanover Department of Community Resources. She and husband Randy have two children: Clara, 15, and Aaron, 18.

“We have great cooks in our group. Each of them makes things that I would not take the time to prepare but my family loves: grilled foods, chicken pot pies, tuna cakes. Overall, everyone really enjoys the meals or it doesn’t get ‘voted’ back on the menu again.“

Rick Melchor was skeptical about the co-op when his family joined.

“But after a few weeks, we realized how nice it was and how it allowed us to spend more evenings doing things other than cooking,“ said Melchor, who is in real estate development. He and wife Courtney, a children’s librarian for Henrico County, have two daughters: Morgan, 7, and Maren, 4.

Melchor, who has been preparing family meals since he was a kid cooking for his mother and sister, handles a lot of the cooking duties in his house. For the co-op, he enjoys grilling salmon and London broil, among other dishes.

“We work the menu so [none of us] is stuck with the most expensive meal every week,“ he said. “One week, I might cook steak; the next week, I might just pick up some deli meat and make subs.“

One of the keys to a successful co-op is the dependability of its members. Bowie said the fact that others are counting on her is motivation.

“I’m doing what I need to do for my family, but I’m adding an exciting twist to it,“ said Bowie, whose husband, Clyde, is pastor of Knox Reformed Presbyterian Church in Mechanicsville, and whose children are Parker, 23, who works in New York; Anne, 20, a student at the University of Virginia; and Finley, 13, a seventh-grader.

“By doing a cooking co-op, it puts the spurs on me. There’s no wiggling out.“

Bowie cannot say enough good things about cooking co-ops, or what they allow families to do.

“I truly believe the world would be a better place,“ she said, “if more families and friends came together for mealtime.“