food

Here's the vision: Six days a week, dinners are shared and prepared by residents. They're vegetarian with vegan options. Each night, two people are responsible for dinner--one is the menu planner and head cook, the other an assistant. A third person is available to clean during and after cooking, and possibly to help with chopping or other mindless grunty parts of the meal preparation. All of these roles, along with other chores, are rotated so that everyone learns to do everything. 

Saturdays, we'll have no communal dinner--you can eat leftovers, cook your own dinner, take advantage of local restaurants, fast, visit a friend, catch a festival, or eat junk food.

Lunches and breakfasts are prepared individually--you can eat dinner leftovers or prepare sandwiches, eat cereal or bagels or fruit, cook your favorite recipe, etc. We will provide small quantities of tuna fish and/or cooked chicken or turkey 2 or 3 times a week for meat-eaters. If you want to eat meat every day, or eat red meat, you can shop for and supply your own. Depending on how it goes and how members feel about resulting messes or meat smells, we may need to make a policy of no meat cooking in the house. Vegetarians who care about such things may be assured that most of our pots and pans won't be used to cook meat; we'll designate 1 or 2 for that purpose.

 We'll stock our kitchen with high quality, mostly organic produce and other ingredients. We will rarely or never buy anything containing hydrogenated oils. We'll also attempt to make sure that most or all of the meat, dairy products, and eggs we supply are hormone/chemical free. And, we’ll make an effort to accommodate people’s allergies and other special needs, though we won’t be able to please everyone 100% of the time. 

We'll stock the house with a wide variety of healthy foods to suit most taste-buds. To keep costs down, we'll go light on meat and cheese and on prepared and packaged foods such as pop-tarts, frozen pizza, or prepared tomato sauce. But if there are special food ingredients you'd like to cook with--either for the nights you're responsible for dinner, or for breakfasts or lunches--say, nori paper or lemongrass or wheat germ--you can request them. As long as they're not outrageously expensive or otherwise unrealistic for us to buy, we'll add them to our shopping list.

Though the kitchen will mainly be stocked with communal supplies, there will be a small amount of shelf and refrigerator space available for personal food.

In addition to helping prepare dinner about once a week, each resident will also contribute to our shared food enterprise by: growing sprouts, working in the vegetable garden, drying and/or canning food in season, baking bread, tending the compost or worm beds, and making granola. Doing all of these things will both help keep our costs down and teach residents lots of helpful, healthy, planet-positive, money-saving skills.