Entertaining the family

Claire Gorman and Michael Halverson check out what their moms brought to a recipe taste-testing party. Claire's mom's meatballs were a favorite.

With all the talk of entertaining this month, I started thinking about a different kind – the kind we do every night, for our families. It’s not always (or even often) what we’d do for company, but if you think about it, what we do every day must be at least as important as what we do for special occasions, right? It’s like wishing for the weekend: If we hold out for Saturday, we won’t enjoy the other days of the week.

Problem is, we get into ruts. I’ll make the same recipe every week for weeks at a time, even though it wouldn’t be too taxing to rotate the repertoire. I have to know I’m not inspiring any kind of dinner table magic with turkey taco salad. From an envelope.

In that spirit, my friend Sarah Sampson had a clever brainstorm: Have a party where everyone brings one of their family’s favorite recipes, cooked, along with enough copies of the written recipe for each family to take home. The kids come, taste everything, and you go home with recipes for anything they’ve approved. Not to mention, you’ve got one night’s dinner down, having fed your people at the party. Genius.

After a couple of years talking about what a great idea she had, Sarah and I finally gave it a go this summer. It was seriously last-minute – I’m talking three-day notice – but we sent an e-mail to a few friends we know like to cook and asked them to join us for a glass of wine while we expanded our fall recipe reserves and the kids taste-tested and (hopefully) hung out together.

Amazingly, the kids – all 16 of them, ranging in age from 5 to 17 – approved just about every recipe. “I’d really like my mom to make some of those [recipes] because all of those were delicious,” 12-year-old William Perdue said. “I think maybe we should do it every once in a while, at least every year. There was nothing I didn’t like.” William’s favorite? Neighbor Susan Gorman’s Italian meatballs (see recipe).

The idea engaged 12-year-old Will Sampson enough that he made dessert for the crew – meringue cookies with cardamom-spiced strawberries.

Come to find out, another group of moms are way ahead of Sarah and me and have been sharing recipes for the past year and a half. Christine Laskin, Karin Davidson, Michelle Frankfort and Brandy Silverman run together every Tuesday morning after carpool. Then they go back to one of the women’s homes – it rotates – and cook a family dinner together. The host chooses a recipe, buys ingredients and tells the other three what containers to bring. Then each runner/chef brings dinner home to her respective family.

Christine, an integrative-health coach, is all about “doing things you love and combining them. We all want to cook, and we want to socialize,” she says. “We would be running, talking about recipes and what we were making for dinner, so Karin suggested we just cook together. Now we run, wash our hands and do a recipe. It’s something we need to do anyway, and our families get excited about what we bring home.” They recap afterwards via e-mail, sharing what their families, including nine children ages 7 to 12, liked or didn’t like. The foursome calls themselves the “Run Away Chefs.”

“We experiment with healthy recipes,” Christine says. “And we’ve made our lives a little more simple. It’s a wonderful thing.”