A Victorious First Attempt!

I don't know about everyone else but my freezer looks awesome with all the food we cooked. I'm excited to try everyone's meals. (Don't be fooled. Not all that food in my freezer is from our exchange. :) )

I think our first attempt at the meal exchange was a success. After talking to several people there are a couple of suggestions that I think we should put into practice for next time.

First, if you have extra add ons like cheese in a bag, french fried onions, etc, put the name of the dish they belong to on the plastic bag, can, or package so that we know which meal it belongs to, then try to attach it to the main meal. If it's a can or you can't attach it to the main meal then place the frozen meal and accessories together in a plastic grocery bag. This will help insure that everyone gets all the accessories.

Another suggestion is to bring your meals in a box or laundry basket so that next time we can just set them up in a line on my kitchen floor and have everyone go around in a line and grab a meal. Hopefully that would keep us from forgetting to grab a meal.

Next time I will have a print out of all the meals everyone is bringing. That way as we walk around grabbing our meals we can just check the meal off the list, making sure we have all of them. This means that at least a couple of days before the exchange I would need to know what everyone is bringing. So make sure you add your meals to the main list on the blog.

Also, several people have mentioned that they know of at least one or two people wanting to join the group. Several of us have talked about it but obviously everyone's opinion is important. So what do you think about adding more people? We were thinking about putting a cap on the amount of people that could join. We were thinking 20 people would be enough. Then if we had even more people than that that wanted to join then they would just have to start their own group. We discussed splitting the group into 2 groups of 10 but people commented that they would rather spend a little more at one time on bulk items and only exchange every 6 weeks then split the group. What do you think?

We would give the people that wanted to join a week to let us know and get up to speed with the blog and the guidelines. That way people could start looking for food on sale now.

I think that's all the suggestions I can think of right now. Let me know what you think about the suggestions and also anything else you can think of.

Good work you guys!

PS, Did someone not get a Sweet and Sour Chicken? I ended up having two extras left at my house. It's in my freezer waiting for someone to claim them. Let me know.