Yes, it’s still Carly’s day to blog and no an alien has not taken over her body. Carly still does not cook. Or should I say I don’t cook well. But it IS the holidays and I love holiday food. Who doesn’t?
So I thought that we should take a break from book talk and talk food today. As you all know, I’ve reconnected with old friends on Facebook and that’s how I found Alison Bermack and her really cool Cooking with Friends Club. Allison is married to an old college friend of mine, and I think this idea of hers is something many of you would find fun and interesting. Cooking with friends. And on a side note, my husband thinks her husband has a MUCH better deal. 
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Now please give a warm jungle welcome to Alison Bermack!
Cooking With Friends (www.cookingwithfriendsclub.com) is a website run by Alison Bermack and Shannon Henry designed to provide home cooks with inspiration, guidance and hands-on information on how to cook with friends. Their site offers access to a free e-newsletter, a Yahoo group and a Facebook community called The Cooking with Friends Club, which connects people all over the country through the common goal of cooking and eating good food. At Cooking With Friends, they think cooking with a friend or family member is more fun, economical and efficient than cooking alone. Cooking together gives you a chance to slow down and talk while you are chopping, sautéing and simmering. You can use their website to share recipes, trade ideas, and schedule cooking dates and swaps. The file section is chock full of advice, inspiration, ideas and big batch recipes.
Sizzle, Serve, Smile.
By Alison Bermack
Founder of The Cooking With Friends Club
Get those hands (and lots of them) going and start peeling potatoes. It’s latke making season! Even if you don’t celebrate Hanukah, these crispy, creamy potato pancakes will make a perfect holiday food. Serve them alongside a baked ham for Christmas brunch and they are an even better substitute for hash browns. Impress your guests at a cocktail party and serve them as Hors d’oeuvres with a dollup of sour cream, chopped chives and even a pinch of caviar. Nothing beats these traditional treats.
Invite a friend over to peel, shred and fry together. Make big batches for your freezer and reheat them for family and friends. They’re even crispier than right out of the skillet. This cuts the labor-intensive part of the recipe in half.
Cooking with friends is especially rewarding during the holidays. It’s a natural stress reliever to hang out with friends while getting something accomplished; it will surely save you money by sharing expenses (anything helps these days); and, of course, there’s the touchy feely benefit – quality time with friends during the season when shopping for the holidays seems to eat all your free time.
Here are some latke making tips and the recipe from the Cooking With Friends e-newsletter:
No Fail Latke Making Tips
• We like Yukon Gold potatoes since they have a creamier consistency, although you can certainly use other types if you wish. (We did a taste test last year against the Russets and the Yukons won!)
• Use shredded potatoes and onions rather than pureed potatoes for a more authentic and crispy result,
• Lightly pan fry the latkes instead of deep frying them (it’s healthier) and sprinkle with kosher salt.
• Use extra virgin olive oil for a richer flavor.
• Since potatoes retain a lot of liquid, work with your hands instead of tongs to strain out the liquid as you place the potatoes in the pan.
• Use two large skillets and work in an assembly line fashion with your friend. One of you forms the pancakes, and the other seasons, flips and strains.
• Make some homemade apple sauce and let it simmer while cooking the pancakes. The sweet scent is sure to get you in the mood to cook (and eat)!
Potato Latkes
Makes 50 latkes
8 Large Yukon Gold Potatoes, peeled and shredded
2 onions, grated
4 tablespoons all purpose flour
2 eggs, lightly beaten
2 cups olive oil
Kosher Salt to taste
Using a Cuisinart (or a hand held tool), shred potatoes and onions on a coarse setting. Drain as much liquid as possible using your hands and paper towels. Place in a bowl with flour and egg. Mix well.
Heat ½ cup olive oil in a 12 inch skillet on medium high heat until bubbling. Work quickly and make a small fist full of the potato mixture with your hand (or tongs) and squeeze out the liquid. Place into the frying pan and flatten slightly. Repeat until you have filled the skillet. Cook until golden (about 3 minutes per side) on both sides and season with kosher salt. Remove and drain on a paper towel lined plate. Repeat the process, refilling the skillet with oil until all of the mixture is used up. If freezing, follow the freezing steps below:
Freezing Tips
1) Drain on paper towel lined plates for 2 minutes.
2) Transfer to a plate or tray that fits into your freezer.
3) Quickly “fresh freeze” the latkes uncovered until they begin to harden (about an hour or two)
4) Transfer to freezer bags and seal out any excess air.
Reheat in an oven on 400 degrees until crispy. Serve with sour cream and apple sauce.
Alison Bermack runs The Cooking with Friends Club with Shannon Henry, her long time best friend from High School. Alison founded the Cooking With Friends Club just over two years ago after discovering cooking with her own friends to be a true life saver in her busy life raising three kids and a hungry husband. She hopes to inspire as many women as possible (and men, for that matter) to give it a try! Visit her on the web at http://www.cookingwithfriendsclub.com/
Carly Phillips would like to take 100% credit for all her stories but the truth is, Carly’s strength is writing family, emotion, funky elderly people and animals. She couldn’t plot her way out of a paper bag, which is why she smartly found her plotmonkey pals early on in her writing career. Thanks to their support, Carly is now a NYT Bestselling author of 23 plus novels. Because writing doesn’t keep her busy enough, Carly is also a wife, a mother of one preteen and one teenage daughter, the primary care giver of her soft coated Wheaten terrier and an expert carpool mom.
Destiny
Dirty Little Secrets
Once Upon A Valentine
Through The Night
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Morning ladies and welcome to Plotmonkeys! You’re making me very hungry. I love the idea of cooking with friends, literally. This time of year, especially. How long have you been doing this, and how big would you say your club is? Across the country sounds pretty amazing. I’ll be looking for some great ideas.
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Thanks for your warm welcome Carly and Stacy. It’s amazing to be greeted so nicely so early in the morning. Better than my overly strong and bitter morning cup of coffee!
In answer to your question Stacy. . . I started cooking with friends when my first born started to eat more — he was almost three. With he and my hungry husband, I needed to figure out a stressfree way to make a lot of food. So, it’s hard to believe, but it has been 9 years. Here was my AHA cooking with friends moment:
My friend Debbie and I met in the waiting room of our sons gymnastics and quickly discovered that our boys both loved to play rescue heroes and we both loved to cook. But, in our sleep deprived new mom lives, we struggled with how to do both. It was a “you got your peanut butter in my chocolate” Reeses moment for us and we decided to combine the two.
The idea of cooking with someone else all made sense to me since I’d been doing it with my Dad since I was a pre-teen. (Who, by the way, I credit for teaching me the fundamentals I would need to have to survive and thrive in the kitchen!) At any rate, I now cook with all my friends and for different reasons. I make healthy lunch foods — soups and sides — with my girlfriend Liz as a “weight watching” approach. I make large batches of dinner foods and freeze for family dinners with Jackie. Suzy and I tend to stick with something simple and often times indulgent — biscotti or scones. (It’s kind of therapy for us.) And Debbie and I mainly try new and harder-to-make foods together that we wouldn’t have the courage to try on on our own.
Cooking with friends has not only defined who I am as a mom and a grown up, but it has truly been my lifesaver as I raise my three hungry and finicky food kids.
I’m not sure how long I should ramble, so I’ll send you to my site where there’s a lot more about me, my partner Shannon, and of course Cooking With Friends. Here’s the link: http://www.cookingwithfriendsclub.com/
Thank you all so much for having me here!
Alison
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I’m Alison’s eight year old daughter Sofia and I started a junior Cooking With Friends Club for kids that love to cook. In the club we could even use
sauce! We could crack eggs and bake bread and eat bread! So get your parents and get your friends and start cooking!
:givethanks
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Welcome, Alison! It’s so cool. So you guys do this even if you don’t live in the same city? You each cook the same things? Is that what you’re saying?
And hi, Sofia. Just as an FYI, Sofia wants to be a writer!
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Hi Alison and Sofia, welcome to the jungle! I’m like Carly – I don’t cook, at least not very well. I have a floor cloth in front of my stove that says “I kiss better than I cook” and my husband has never argued that statement. :happy2:
But I have a 13 year old boy who loves to cook. He says he sometimes will be sitting in class and a recipe idea will come to him. He writes it down, then comes home and pulls something out of the freezer and works with it. He’s a huge hunter and eats everything he kills (deer, duck, geese, wild pig, turkey, dove, quail) so there’s always a stocked freezer for him to choose from. So far, the only thing I’ve been willing to try was the venison but the marinade he made was really good. I’ll pass your website on to him.
Oh, and I think I might be able to make the No Fail Latkes! Have a great day, everyone!!
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Welcom Sofia and Alison! All I can say is “YUMMY”. You are all making me hungry!
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Welcome Alison! I love the idea of cooking with friends and will send your site to all of my friends. Some of my friends already take turns a couple night a week cooking dinner. They live about a mile from each other and the 2 families eat together twice a week. My friends and I also get together once a month for potluck dinners.
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Sofia, I love that you have started a cooking club with your friends. My 2 oldest nieces have both been cooking since they were pretty young and my dad did the same with my siblings and me. Good luck with your writing!
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Hi, Alison! Cooking (baking for me) is my stress and writer’s block buster. My dad was a cordon bleu chef (by hobby and training, not by career). I remember MANY years ago when Playboy used to have recipes. Yes. Yes, it did. Believe it or not. My mother was off somewhere and Dad decided he wanted to try putting the “dinner” from the magazine together. There wasn’t a dry pan in the house. I helped cook and the rule in our house was, “If you cook, you don’t have to do dishes.” My brother was stuck with this mountain of pans!
That was the night Dad decided to go to cooking school.
I love holiday baking. I make cookies, breads, cinnamon and/or vanilla rolls, and dinner rolls for friends, family, neighbors, and my husband’s colleagues. I need to get started, just as soon as I finish this round of edits. I’ve got a tin of Christmas cookies going to Canada and it might be nice if they actually made it before New Year’s. :doh:
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Hi Alison! Welcome to the Jungle! Cooking with Friends is a way cool idea! How fun! I haven’t eaten potatoe latkes in such a long time. My mother used to make them and they were awesome. Thanks for the recipe and tips.
Take care, everyone and have a great day. It’s snowing here! :freezin
Cher
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Hi, Alison! Great idea, although I’m not much of a cook, either! The latkes sounds delicious though–I’ll have to muster up my courage and head to the kitchen!
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Hi, Alison (and Sofia, too!). Welcome to the jungle! It’s great to have you here! :wave:
What a fun concept! And the recipe sounds not only easy (a requirement for me :giggler) but delicious, too. I must give this one a try.
Now, I’m off to check out your website . . .
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Thanks for the site info! A friend and I have been cooking together for over a year. We cook, or bake, in bulk and freeze. It makes eating at home so much easier. Cool site!
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I’m not so much in to cooking as I am into baking. However, if I had someone to cook with, I might like it better. This sounds like a good idea.
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What a great idea! Welcome the the Jungle Alison & Sofia. I love to cook & bake, it is a stress reliever that I didn’t realize I was using! Baking is the real stress reliever for me although now that I am retired I don’t need it much. I bake or cook because I love to eat & I like good food! Cookies are what I love to bake best but I also do some sweet breads such as pumpkin bread, pumpkin gingerbread, chocolate apple bread the list goes on! My oldest grandson told me my job was to make him cookies! I try to do that often and will bake him several kinds for Christmas. I better get busy!! Trying new recipes is half the fun of cooking/baking. Since I am alone some things are just hard to do for one person but I’ve developed a few things over the years. Cooking is one of my creative outlets, yum!! The only time I have cooked with friends is at their place. Where I now live is a “one butt kitchen” as my mom would have said!!
Great idea for a blog today. Thanks Carly & thanks Alison for sharing with us.
:flower4you:
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This is one of the nicest communities I’ve ever been included in. And, I love the emoticons.
“One Butt Kitchen” makes me laugh since I use that phrase when I tell people that all kitchens are suitable to cook in with a friend and that nothing should stop people from cooking together. And, there’s always the next room to spread out in! Thanks again for having me.
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This is for Ahannah:
It’s ok if you have a 13 yearold boy, he can still cook with us!!!!! I am going to write a blog on the cooking with friends club!
By!
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Oooo I love latkes! In college a bunch of us got together and made latkes… Well, my friend formed them, and I cooked them all. Pretty sure I made about 100, and ate none
We were all crowded in a tiny dorm/apartment – and… set off the fire alarm. lol whoops. The guys tried to disconnect the smoke detector… anyway it was a lot of excitement 
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What a fun idea and a yummy looking recipe!
I always enjoy getting together with my sisters for cookie baking over the holidays. Never thought about doing it for dinners. Fortunately, hubby’s a good cook, so I do have somebody to play around with in the kitchen.
Thanks so much for being here with us today, Alison!
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I think this is a great idea, however, after too many years of catering, I don’t think it would be for me. I have finally mastered cooking small meals just for us and not having a ton of leaftovers. :yumturk Not only that, I hate to share my kitchen. I am a control freak that way.
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I like the idea too. And I looked at your site. Very pretty and lots of good info. Cheers. :freezin