This past week, we had our first-ever cooking club. A few of my closest girlfriends and I have been doing a book study together for a few years now, and when we first started hearing about Shauna Niequist's newest book, Bread and Wine, we knew it would be so much fun to do the whole experience together. So we did! We read the first part of the book and followed her plan for the cooking club which includes a meal plan and recipes. We split up the meal, brought all of our ingredients to my friend Lindsay's house, and dove in!
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| Jen chopping onions for the risotto |
We cooked and laughed and talked and sipped wine and had such a blast trying new recipes and creating foods we didn't even know how to pronounce. It was exactly how I would have imagined it being...and better! Bumping into one another in the kitchen, flipping pages of the book to find the right recipes, chatting about what we had read, and laughing so hard along the way.
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| Katie and Lindsay |
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| The four of us...about to dive in and start cooking! |
When an unexpected phone call came in about someone's coworker and close friend in the hospital, we stopped, cried, prayed, and then quietly kept cooking. It was such a picture of real life lived together...talking, laughing, crying, praying, celebrating, mourning, all in the space of one evening.
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| Crushing black peppercorns with the bottom of the cast iron pan |
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| The risotto simmering...this was something none of us had ever made! |
After all of our food was prepared, we sat at the table Lindsay had beautifully set and enjoyed the nicest sit-down dinner ever! We marveled the whole time about how wonderful everything tasted and how fun it was to cook together.
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| Our final meal: Salad with Basic Vinaigrette dressing, Basic Risotto, and Steak au Poivre with Cognac Pan Sauce |
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| Blueberry Crisp |
I already can't wait for our next cooking club night in July! What a treat. I couldn't remember the last time I had so much fun and that I laughed so hard.
I think Shauna would be proud.
What's becoming clearer and clearer to me is that the most sacred moments, the ones in which I feel God's presence most profoundly, when I feel the goodness of the world most arrestingly, take place at the table....What happens around the table doesn't matter to a lot of people. But it matters more and more to me. Life at the table is life at its best to me, and the spiritual significance of what and how we eat, and with whom and where, is new and profound to me every day. I believe God is here among us, present and working. I believe all of life is shot through with God's presence, and that part of the gift of walking with him is seeing his fingerprints in all sorts of unexpected ways. - Shauna Niequist, Bread and Wine
