Learning to Share the Kitchen

Dan and I are preparing to be volunteer cooks at Jerusalem University College for the coming school year.  One of the first tasks that we're beginning to work on is learning to cook together.  When we're there we'll be cooking for around 50 people for breakfast and 70 for lunch.  We will not be in charge of dinner but will be able to enjoy the cooking of a locally hired cook for that meal.  There's no exact way to practice for that size of a crowd in our little two bedroom apartment in Chicago...  but we can at least work on learning to cook our smaller meals together. 

I, for one, am finding out that this is a harder learning curve than I might have expected.  The first thing I discovered is that cooking with Dan isn't like cooking with my mom.  He needs a little bit more coaching than I'm accustomed to.  I should keep this in mind and realize that at this point I'm a bit more of the teacher in the kitchen.  But I don't exactly have the kind of patience it takes to be a good teacher.  Something to work on.  So I'm wondering if we should try a new approach.  Instead of jumping into cooking a weeknight meal together when I'm not only anxious to eat but the different steps can be time-sensitive in relation to each other, maybe we should work on what type of steps might go into a meal.  For example, I learned a good way to cut an onion that I could teach him.  From there we could move to other things that might be difficult to chop and chop, chop, chop!  The better we both are at chopping, the faster we'll be at making our meals.  If Dan does have a cooking specialty, however, it is in making breakfast and packing lunches!  And he's really good at washing dishes...


Do you have any suggestions for what meal preparation tasks we should work on next?