in house cooks?
 

Do any of your chapters have a cook?
How many members do you have on your in house meal plan?
How is the price compared to an on campus meal plan?
How is the food?

Re: in house cooks?
 

Do any of your chapters have a cook?

Each of the sororities on my campus has a big kitchen and paid employees who cook for us.

How many members do you have on your in house meal plan?

Everyone in a sorority (including those who don't live in the house) is required to eat lunch at their house on weekdays, plus chapter dinner once a week. That is the minimum required plan. If you wanted to, you could sign up to eat more weeknight dinners at the house, but that plan is only "required" for in-house girls.

How is the price compared to an on campus meal plan?

I think the sorority meal plans are somewhat more expensive per meal than if you ate in the dining hall.

How is the food?

The food is very decent, at least comparable with what is served in the dining hall, plus you can put in requests if you want something new. Each house has some discretion over what is served.

every sorority at UM has a cook with busboys. I think the fraternities have cooks come in occasionally, dunno.

All the girls are on this plan because its part of the rent. I think the only day to have dinner thats mandatory is Sunday (?).

Living in a sorority or fraternity house is always chepaer then living at the dorms and the food is 100X better. (Our house mom cooked alot for the chapter before we got another cook)

All the sororities on this campus who have houses have cooks. Some are better than others. My sorority seems to have a cook problem no matter what--we've had about seven different ones in the past year!

Everyone living in the house (40 girls) pays to eat dinner and supper here, but it isn't a separate part of our bill. We are just charged one amount that covers everything (about $1800 per semester), so I don't know how much it costs. We aren't required to eat the food we pay for, though. I try to eat as often as I can, but many times I have classes so I miss dinner and then supper might be something really gross, who knows? We don't have any say in the making of the menu. :(

As for the food itself, it's generally better than the cafeterias on campus. Each cook we've had did things their own way, so the food varied depending on who cooked it. I guess it's all right...like I said, it's better than cafeteria food, but it sure ain't like my mom's! (Case in point: Night before last, the fried chicken was not done...it was still pink inside, and one of my friends got sick. Not good!)

We have an in-house cook. We have 10 meals a week (Monday- Friday, lunch and dinner). Every sister is on the house meal plan. It is tacked onto our dues. It ends up being cheaper to be on the ZTA meal plan. If you add up all the meals you get for the semester and divide it by the amount owed for food, it ends up being about $3 per meal. Not bad! And the food is great. There's a lot of variety in the menu. It's great because I eat things there that I wouldn't normally eat if I had to cook for myself (such as stuffed chicken, fajitas, etc.)

what is the difference between dinner and supper?:confused:

We had our own cook, and so do most of the sororities. We lucked out though. Our cook was a former gourmet cook/restaurant owner in town. I miss his cooking sooo much!!:(
His wife (also a cook) worked at one of the houses just up the street, so they would trade cooking tips and plans with each other. We got to have a weekly menu and if there was something we wanted, you just asked him if it was possible. I don't know but I'm pretty sure that the meal was included in the housebill.

All of the sorority/fraternity houses on our campus had a kitchen staff and a janitorial staff. (In our house, the janitorial staff consisted of two maids...then, in the kitchen we had one lady who was the main cook, & she had 2 assistants. One of the assistants was a man who also did some handywork around the house and did things like take out the trash, etc.)
We were offered 3 meals a day, 5-6 days a week. The cooks also made food for our pre-football-game brunches and homecoming and parents day lunches (and any other special events we asked them to cater). The meals were included in the house bill. Breakfast was optional for people who lived off campus. Everyone paid for lunch & supper whether they ate there or not. If you had a class or something at night, you could request a "late plate" and the cooks would make you a take-out version of that night's dinner in one of those divided styrofoam plates and write your name on it. :) We also had a fridge downstairs that was open to everyone and had juice, tea, milk, etc. and a cabinet with cereal, pop tarts, granola bars and the like. Plus, the cooks would often make little treats for us and leave them in the dining room. The food was pretty good and there was a nice variety. I've heard it's even better now because there's a new housemother and a new cook. I think the cost was comparable to the school meal plan.

Yes that's right. My dad tells me I'm being "fancy" when I call the evening meal dinner - whatever! :p

I have a dumb question - do the cooks live in? What do you do with live in staff during rituals if they aren't members? All this is completely foreign to me. The closest we got to having a cook in the house is when a sister made popcorn and shared it. :D

My experience was almost identical to GammaPhiBabe's (meal plan and house help). We also had something called the transient plan. You could only be on this for 2 semesters the whole time you were in college though...it included 5 meals a week plus Sunday dinner. Everyone had to be on some kind of meal plan whether or not you lived in the house.
Our hired help did not live in the house. Our house mom obviously lived there though, but she was not an initiated Phi Mu. Whenever we had ritual she would just leave the house and go to her family's (they lived in town) while it was going on.

Our staff left after the evening meal and came back in the mornings. We didn't have a place in the house for them to live and, anyway, they all had families to go home to. It was just a day job to them...they were all older people.
Our housemother lived in the house. She had a suite that was on the lower level of the house (our rooms were upstairs). She did not take part in our ritual events, but either stayed in her room or left the house. I think the current housemother was a Sigma Kappa (SK is no longer on our campus).

Sig Eps are the only House to have a cook at Illinois State out of 30 fraternities. Its ok food but the main thing is not having to walk to the cafateria. That shit sucks.

Same at UM, all house staff (cooks, busboys, maids, etc) live in their own houses. LIke Gammaphibabe said our house mom lived in quarters (a really sweet apartment) downstairs while the other rooms where on the second and third floors. Our house mom could participate in rituals because she was an AGD. If they werent then they cant. Our chapter has actually had a house dad in its history.

Do any of your chapters have a cook?
Emporia State University, Emporia, Kansas Sigma Sigma Sigma.
We have a cook, Margaret

How many members do you have on your in house meal plan? Everyone pays house bills in and out (they're cheaper if you're out) and food is provided for all meals. 90 women.

How is the price compared to an on campus meal plan? Much cheaper.

How is the food? Food is awesome!

I live in a sorority house. I know a lot of sororities on other campuses live in dorms so I don't know the price comparison. I have a cook. She cooks Sunday dinner, M_TH lunch and dinner, and Friday lunch. She is an okay cook. The food is decent. My rent a month is $425 and includes my meals. Teh Sigma Kappas next door have a really good cook apparently he cooks shrimp and steak. They also pay a lot more than we do. Thus we have no hashers bc our cook isn't like Sigma Kappas. CAse in point Friday lunch was grilled cheese and spaghettios.

That is a really good price per month since it includes food! But grilled cheese and spaghettios? Sick...a tossed salad would have been cheaper and would have tasted better! Anyway, at my school, the sororities and fraternities do not have cooks because the groups that have houses only house like 10 or fewer people. I lived in the ATO house at SMU after they got kicked off campus. The university opened it up to sophomores and up who had to interview for a spot and then if you got in, you had to do 30 hours of community service per semester (not hard). We had the restaurant style kitchen with the giant fridges and freezers and giant food prep area, pantry, ultra-fast diswasher (the kind that takes like one minute!). But we did not have a cook. It was nice though 'cause we could buy our own food and cook whatever we wanted and then there was some food (not a lot) that was for general house use, like condiments, pancake mix, popcorn, crackers, etc. The fraternities and sororities there had cooks. I sort of wish I had been in DZ at a school that had cooks and huge houses, but oh well! I think I'll live :)

YUCK
 

Believe me I that isn't even the worst meal I think her french fry casserole would qualify. Half the time the french frys are still cold. It 's french frys with meat and chesse on top. A lot of girls go out to eat at least 3 times a wk.

Yuck....AlphaSigLana I'm sorry that you all have such an awful cook. We were always very lucky. Plus we had a committee (only like 1 or 2 people) that was called "Mom and Meals" They informally got imput from all of us on what we would like for lunch and dinner each week. They would make up sample meal plans and then submit them to "mom" who would ultimately have the final say. We also had a full salad bar at lunch and dinner in case you didn't like what was being served. Has your chapter approached your house corporation or advisor about finding a new cook?? It sounds like one is in order.

Well this is the 3rd cook our house has had in a yr. She is very open to suggestions. WEll we had a comment card, but people wrote really rude things. Now that I am house manager I will take girls complaints and tell DAnielle, but no one has said to me to tell her to stop cooking such and such a meal. She did submit a list of all the foods she cooked beforehand. Plus she only gets $350 to spend a wk on 20 girls. Actualy housing corp just decided in $350 she used to only be able to spend $320. SO she can't make shrimp etc. WE get cheap fatty food.

The idea of having an in-house cook is so exotic to me! We had our DZ table in the cafeteria and the closest we had to in-house cooking was when we'd all gather in the informal living room and share each other's Ramen Noodles or Kraft Mac and Cheese!

KillarneyRose, it sounds like we had the same DZ house! Yeah, it is more like let's order pizza or everyone bring some food over...before we got rid of our house we did that kind of stuff. And then we had a pantry that was half for the girls in the house who bought their personal groceries and half for chips, crackers, cokes, and other snackies that were for the chapter when we would come in between classes and stuff. Of course, I am on a mostly commuter campus, so it's a different ballgame down here than it was for the sororities that I saw at SMU (my pre-greek days). I didn't rush there but other than living in an ex-fraternity house, I did get to see the inside of a sorority house because one of the girls wanted to interview me for a newspaper article and asked me to go over there...that was highly illegal since it was during the first semester of my freshman year and they have spring formal rush! It was on the DL, but I wasn't rushing there anyway. I think it was a secret ploy to try to get me to go through, but who knows...oh...I digress...I hope one day I will have daughters and they will be in a sorority where there is yummy food :)

Oh yeah, I forgot. After we got rid of our house (landlord decided to sell so we couldn't renew the lease, plus we are building a greek row) I got an apartment and lived with one of my sisters and another sister lived a few apartments down. I cooked dinner on Monday nights after chapter meeting for everyone in my family line in the sorority (direct decendants of my big) which is about 15-20 people. That was always fun. We called them family dinners. I would make salad and spaghetti or tacos or some other easy thing and someone would bring bread or dessert and drinks or whatever. We stopped having them when I moved out of the apartment though :(

I do feel bad for our cook since she cooks for twenty girls and often many of htem sign up but don't eat- what a waste. There is a menu so everyone knows what the meal is. Our cook even does late plates so if you aren't home when meals are served you are sure to get one. It would suck not to have a cook bc there are some girls in the house who like to eat other people's food. It really pissed me off when i lived in the house over break with a few other girls and a certain sister would never buy food and bitch that their wasn't food in the house(rent was cheaper over break bc we didn't have a cook - she knew beforehand food was on us). I spent money on food and made my own meals with one of my roommates(who never chipped in equally). My roommate would invite her to eat the food I bought! Did this girl ever cook- no! A cook saves me grief. Maybe I am just selfish.

All the houses at Nebraska have cooks.

Some are better than others. Ours is awesome, and I love her to death. All the brothers who live in the house get meals as part of their live in fees. Those who live out have two options - either all meals or only monday night formal dinners. I think most choose all meals b/c then they don't have to pay for fast food. I'm not sure about my pledge brothers who live in the dorms. I think that they have plans for both, but only the cheapest dorm one.

Considering that room and board for the house, for pledges is only 90 dollars more than it would be for the dorms, and out of that we get social activities, supplies like pledge manual, badge adn the like, it's obviously more economical to be in the house. After the first semester the house bill is only about 2000 dollars a semester so in the end it adds up to be about 300 dollars cheaper than the dorms.

Finally, the food we have is fantastic, but not all the houses have such a good cook. So we are really lucky. For me, the food is a lot more regular and better than the food I have at home so I enjoy it.

Do you mean that pledges can live in the house? Would you mind explaing how that works?

We have our own cook. She works from about 9:30 am to 3:30pm. Her husband was our milkman for several years, and is still friends with many guys at the house. She cooks lunch 5 times a week and dinner 4 times a week. She also orders food for us on the weekends. Our entire meal plan is only $200 a quarter, and is open kitchen basically. All in house guys are on it, and the out of house guys just sign up on a sign up sheet for snacks and meals, which vary from $.50 to $2.00 for snacks and dinner respectively.

Also, we have AM's (Pledges to most Frats) living in house, 4 of them this year. It works out fine. When we practice for Initiation, they aren't allowed near where we practice. Also, when we have Initiation, the house is closed to non-brothers, so AM's have to leave the house early.

oh...so after rush they just move out of the dorms??

We've got a two cooks, one in charge of lunch and one in charge of dinner. Neither of them live with us. We've also got a dozen busboys that rotate shifts. They're usually frat guys, so it's funny when I see them outside of the house and inadvetently embarrass them by exclaiming, "Omigod! It's my busboy!" They just smile and exclaim back, "Omigod! It's my sorority girl!" My non-Greek friends think we're spoiled, but how else are that many girls supposed to get their food? If we had walkthroughs every night, it would be pandemonium.