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By making food for each other, my friends and I also make time for each other.
I'm not saying we're as pure as everyone on GBBO, but we do help each other out when we have cooking fails like everyone on that show does. And just like my favorite baking show, the recipe club inspires me to cook and bake more often. We always send around the recipes we made once we get home, and as someone with limited cooking skills (and kitchen space), I'm always much more willing to try a recipe if I've already eaten it and have been told what it was like to make it.
We don't have a designated recipe club secretary because we're all the kind of people who live for follow-up emails and putting a date on the calendar. But we spend the last few minutes of our meetup picking a day for the next one. Sure, we could figure it out over email, but doing it in person — and all of us putting the date in our calendars at the same time — makes it all much more ironclad and official.
Inspired by me and my friends, a coworker recently started a recipe club of her own, but, instead of picking an ingredient each time, they choose a theme. Last month's theme? Global dishes, inspired by the Olympics! My group, too, has bent the "rules." March proved to be a tricky month for scheduling, thanks to holidays and travel. So instead of cooking and meeting up on a weekend like we've done in the past, we're bringing in food from our favorite takeout places after work on a Thursday so we can de-stress, eat, and put in some much-needed face time.
Most times, we end up just hanging out at someone's apartment for hours after all of the eating and cleaning up is done, because we've already mentally reserved most or all of the day for each other. Doing that was never part of the expectation (and if someone needs to leave early, we don't, like, blockade the door), but it reveals our true reason for doing all of this: Intentionally making time and space in our lives for relationships we spent so many years cultivating.
A recipe club, rather than a book club or something like that, works great for us. None of us are master chefs, but pouring our hearts into making something delicious happens to be all of our love languages. Even when one of us is having a rough week or month and can only muster the energy to bring a container of pre-cut berries, we accept it for what it symbolizes — a commitment to showing up for each other. And that, to me, is pretty darn sweet.