We’re starting a Cooking Club!

January 2003

Over the holidays I started thinking about having a cooking club that would meet periodically and make meals together.  I had barely started formulating the idea, when my friend, R, approached me and suggested a similar idea!  The two of us immediately thought our friend M would be a perfect addition and when we approached her with the idea she decided to join us.  Already our club was coming together!

We decided to have a little planning meting to lay our guidelines for the club and figure out who else we’d ask to join us.  On a rainy Saturday morning (okay, it is Seattle and most of them are rainy in January…) we met at 611 Supreme, which has excellent crepes (review), to grab a bite and get down to business. 

Since everyone seems to have fairly busy schedules, we thought that meeting once every two months would be more manageable than monthly.  So we broke the year into two-month periods with the exception of November/December.  For that period we decided that our meeting would alwasy be in early November to reduce conflicts with other holiday activities. 

Since there would be six meetings in the year we thought having six people in the club would be perfect.  Each person would host once during the year and it worked out well for dividing up the courses.  Now we just had to choose three more people. 

We decided there should be some basic criteria for membership:

• Members should be "adventurous" in their eating habits
• No vegetarians – nothing against them, it’s just that we like meat – a lot! :-)
• Should be interested in expanding their cooking skills
• Need to be reliable and committed to the group
• Need to be fun-loving and play well with others

I had one additional personal criterion.  I wanted the group to be a bit diverse and made up of people from different parts of my life or from R and M’s lives.  The club would not only broaden my food horizens but also introduce me to new people and ideas. 

Now we all thought finding three more people would be a piece of cake – we all know tons of other people and we really didn’t have that many criteria, did we?  Turns out we were a little wrong about that.  We knew people who loved to cook but only ate chicken.  We knew people who were reliable but didn’t like to cook.  Or eat, for that matter.  We knew people who traveled a lot and couldn’t really be sure they’d be able to make meetings.  We probably sorted through thirty or forty people trying to put together our next three members.  The first two came fairly easily.  We added V and K within a week.  But that 6th person kept eluding us.  After a couple weeks of trying people out we finally decided to leave it at five members.

Somewhere during this time, I had come up with the name Table for Six and had already set up a website and some other things based on that name.  When we decided to stop at five members we also decided to keep the name.  We all enjoy having guests in our homes.  So the sixth seat represented the guest we’d all like to include.  (Sort of like the 12th man in football!)

Coming next – a little background on each of the members.