Neighbors take turns making ‘family meal’

I grew up in the leafy suburbs of the Midwest, where contact with the neighbors was limited to the occasional cross-yard wave from a car window before pulling into the garage.

The idea of sharing food with them on a weekly basis, let alone the infrequent celebration, would have been inconceivable. Block parties, I believed, were just a quaint relic of Americana from a Norman Rockwell painting.

And then we moved to rowhouse Philadelphia, where the kids frolic in the concrete "yard" of our street, the next-door neighbors are our great friends (a good thing, since I smell their meatballs cooking), and the 30-plus houses around us spontaneously combust in block parties seemingly every few weeks. Just name an event - Memorial Day, birthdays, crawfish season, the sudden arrival of cherry blossoms - and we're tapping a keg, firing up the grill, and unfolding tables to celebrate the moment.

We've become so good at eating together, in fact, that three families decided this year to take it to the next level: school nights.

Our Monday night "family meals" - in which each family takes a tri-weekly turn cooking for all three - began as a matter of convenience. We all had kids on the same swim team, and everyone had been arriving home famished at 6:30 with nothing yet begun on the stove. So why not divide the work and cook an easy, reheatable meal on Sunday to share Monday all around?

The debut dinner was a feast of Nana LaRosa's meatballs, an authentic Indianapolis-Sicilian recipe that Joe and Dawn have brought East (where thankfully it acquired a few more garlic cloves).

Duty-bound to protect the honor of family gravy, our neighbors on the other side, Melissa and Doug, then turned out meatballs true to Granny Spinelli's recipe from Sicilian Bucks County.

I'm not getting in the middle of this one - I loved them both! - but each typified the spirit of these meals, a true sharing of family traditions as much as an unspoken (but friendly) competition.

And quickly, after a dozen meals, what began as a Swim Night necessity has become an anticipated ritual on its own, not to mention a subtle bonding between friends that only home-cooked meals can forge. (Swim season ended last week, but we plan on continuing the rotation until summer.)

I have a weakness for weekend cooking projects too grand for my little family, so I'll admit to getting carried away by the opportunity to cook for a big, forgiving audience. But they seemed eager enough to eat my experiments with turkey-chorizo paella and turkey-wild mushroom crepes (two separate post-Thanksgiving wonders!), as well as casseroles of Umbrian lentils with sausage, and herb-marinated grilled chicken breasts with cool quinoa salad.

Then again, I do wonder whether this cooking frenzy has actually helped feed the target audience - our hungry kids - that inspired these dinners to begin with. Considering that we eat the meals separately inside our own homes (the only way this could ever work on a school night), I may never know the truth.

Melissa claims that Monday suppers have exposed her kids to a world of new flavors. At their house, the "family meal" is required eating. Her 5-year-old even phoned me one night to rave about the lentils, and he seemed genuine, though I swear I heard suspicious whispering in the background.

Joe and Dawn's kids, meanwhile, are a tougher crowd, giving me the cold stares of professional poker players when I ask if there's been anything they liked.

"They still won't touch anything with green specks in it," confides Joe. "But they have learned to tolerate new smells in the house!"

Our kids, meanwhile, fall somewhere in the middle. My picky 6-year-old son will cautiously eat half of what's on offer. My 9-year-old daughter, meanwhile, has discovered favorites, including Dawn's hearty chili, Joe's chicken cutlets, and Melissa's deluxe lasagna, to name a few.

One of the biggest surprise hits, though, was Melissa's honey-glazed salmon with fresh basil served over strawberries and salad. For one thing, it's way healthier than anything we'd serve. For another, the recipe came from an unlikely source for G-rated meals: InterCourses: An Aphrodisiac Cookbook.

"It was a wedding-shower gift gone right," says Melissa, cheerily.

The guys on the block, meanwhile, can only roll their eyes. Doug coughs, cueing Joe to quip: "It must have a delayed effect."

Too much information? Not on our block. After three months of Monday "family meals" and counting, the neighbors have become more a part of our family than this former suburbanite could ever have imagined.