Eating together

The communal table is the part of Anceu people remember. Not because the food is remarkable — some nights it is, some nights it is pasta — but because sitting down with the same fifteen to twenty people three times a week does something that no amount of coworking does.

A Wednesday, cooked by three of us.

How it works

Dinner is Monday, Wednesday and Friday, from around 20:00. Colivers are split into three groups, and each group takes a turn cooking and cleaning up. Three dinners, three groups: you cook once a week.

That structure exists for a reason. Without it, either the same two generous people cook every night or nobody does.

Healthy co-cooking

We cook to a set of guidelines we wrote ourselves, aimed at feeding fifteen to twenty people something nutritious with simple techniques and a normal budget. It is not a diet and nothing is compulsory — it is a floor, so that “we are cooking for everyone tonight” does not default to the cheapest possible carbohydrate.

Dietary requirements are ordinary here. Tell us and the group cooks around them.

Fridays: cooking what is left

On Friday the dinner is made from whatever the week did not use. It began as a way to stop throwing food away and became the meal with the most invention in it — the one where somebody discovers that the answer to three tired courgettes is a soup nobody expected.

Breakfast, lunch, and the rest

Breakfast is included and self-service: coffee, tea, bread. Lunch is on you, and because everyone’s work rhythm is different that turns out to be the sane arrangement. There is no shop in the village, so the everyday goes through the weekly online order, and there is a supermarket ten minutes away by car.

Ask us anything about the food — it is one of the questions we get most.

See also: A week at Anceu · Healthy co-cooking is born