You know that when you are regularly cooking, your kitchen just “works” better. You have ingredients on hand to use for several dishes; last night’s rice gets re-purposed into tonight’s stew, extra fresh herbs find their way into a brunch, a dinner and a snack. In a similar way, when I’m regularly cooking with my friends, I just naturally start to share food, too.
Alison wrote about this–I’ll call it a phenomenon because it’s pretty amazing–in her last blog. My friend Evelyn, who lives across the street from us said “wow!” It’s just what we do, too. If she has some extra homemade pizza dough, she offers it to me. When I’ve been making a marathon dumpling batch or testing a recipe of Chicken Soup, I think about setting some aside for my friend. Honestly, I hadn’t really thought before about how Cooking With Friends offers this subtle benefit–a feeling of “the communal kitchen,” connecting us to each other even when you are not actually cooking together. It just happens.