Cookins are an opportunity to share your home and hearth

Originally from the UseNet Newsgroup rec.food.cooking, cook-ins are an opportunity for you to open your home to complete strangers who become your best friends. They arrive with complete dishes or ingredients to make them, cook in your kitchen, (sometimes they clean up after them self) and leave you with way too much food in your refrigerator. Sometimes your kitchen winds up cleaner after a cookin is over than before it started.

We have had 3 cook-ins at our house. October 2003, June 2004 and June 2005. Each was a wonderful experience.

June 2004: The second cook-in brought many of the same cooks back for another go in our kitchen, and a few new people appeared at the door. Nothing was left un-eaten.

June 2006: This cook-in was hosted by Terry and Bill Burd at their lovely condo looking over the ocean. The conversation ranged from Sex (with holding thereof from people who would not come), to Drugs (which purse had the largest selection of them), to Rock-and-Roll (Bill had some tickets to a concert which Terry and He could not attend). Lots of fun again, and for those of you who could not (or would not) make it, there are the usual selection of pictures. Since David and Katherine were not hosts, David took a lot more pictures.

We've even got 10 reasons to host your own cook-in:

10A reason to clean the house

9 Put a face to names

8 Compare the number of cookbooks you own

7 A chance to show off

6 The Recipes

5 Be mean in person

4 Add tools to your kitchen

(Somebody always forgets something)

3 The conversation

(which gets better after...)

2 The Drinking

1 The food