The Cooking Club

Over twenty years ago, Elizabeth, the Mama, and two of her friends got together to meal prep. The goal was to have a few meals in their freezer to feed all those hungry people who kept showing up for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. One of those friends was sure that it could never work, yet two months in, they were hooked. Nothing compared to the ease of having home-cooked meals ready in their freezers. For the next fifteen years, the group grew and gathered monthly and cooked together. Over those years, the women involved may have changed occasionally, but Elizabeth always hosted and took care of all the shopping and prep. Through the years, the goal remained the same: gather our families around the dinner table, but do it in a way that makes it a little easier during the busy parts of life.

• Elizabeth used a group chat to set everyone’s menus, then made grocery lists and planned the day.   
  
• The meals used to be covered with heavy-duty aluminum foil (actual lids for “cooking club” members were added much later)  
  
• Each person’s name was written on the foil with the meal name and instructions for cooking. The most common instruction “Bake at 350 until bubbly”.    
  
• Mistakes were often made in the labeling: Once, the instruction for Poppyseed Chicken was supposed to say “Add poppyseeds” (because Elizabeth had forgotten to purchase them), but the instructions written on everyone’s lid said, “Poppyseed Chicken – Add Chicken.” Clearly incorrect.  
  
• The group generally consisted of 5-6 women who gathered each month.  
  
• The name “Cackling Hen’s Cooking Club” was given to the group by Elizabeth’s husband because he said it always sounded like there was more “cackling” than cooking.  
  
• The recipes they used then are still many of the same ones used by Good Batch Mama today.    
  
• Even after Good Batch Mama was in existence, the group still got together and cooked. Now the group orders meals from the website and then goes to lunch out to hang out instead.