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Resource Center:
Advice From the Potluck Queen
By Alicia Becton
November 28, 1999
Most of you are
familiar with Potluck dinners from
various church parties or picnics. Maybe
your church bulletin assigned A-D for a main dish, E-J for a vegetable, etc.
Every part of the meal is covered without any one person going to a lot
of trouble. Somehow, it fell my lot
to become ‘Potluck Queen’ for our college and career class and organize
these dinners for different occasions throughout the year.
Being
mostly single and either unwilling or unable to cook, our class loves a good
potluck. We always have plenty of
food, a wholesome meal, and leftovers to send home with a poor college student
from the class. Allow me to share
some of the ideas we employ to make potluck parties fun without becoming
routine.
-
Create
a theme potluck where everyone brings a dish related to the theme.
For example, we’ve done both a Mexican and an Italian theme and
decorated accordingly. We even
had a couple girls rise to the challenge of doing fried ice cream and
sopapillas for the Mexican dinner dessert – very impressive.
A couple of the guys outdid themselves with pasta dishes for the
Italian dinner, and then of course, a couple brought bread.
That’s one of the beauties of the potluck: if you want to try to cook something or have skills in that
area, we’ll gladly let you cook, but if you can’t cook, we can always
assign you the bread, cheese, salsa, or whatever else to bring.
-
Name
all of the dishes something off the wall or church-related. For example,
one of the student’s mother fixes an awesome pasta salad either with or
without cucumbers. So, we’ve affectionately named it ‘Pasta Becton’
for without cucumbers and ‘Pasta C. M. Becton’ with cucumbers.
After all the dishes have been creatively named and everyone has
tried everything they want to try, vote on the top three dish names. You can
vote for best tasting (obviously), best creative recipe, best appearance,
etc. The top dishes then get a
prize. It has gotten to a point
with our group that when we refer to certain dishes; i.e. the ‘Barry Pope
salad’ that only our group knows what in the world we are talking about.
(Barry Pope is a man at our church and the salad is a frozen berry
salad.) I’m sure you can see
the hours of fun this can provide.
I’m not the most creative person in our church, but you’d be surprised how
easily the ideas flow within a group of people.
We’ve almost gotten our dinners down to a science and it doesn’t
require much work when people volunteer what they want to bring.
Our next potluck is our annual CAC (college and career) Family Christmas
party next month. I’m working on
that one as you read this…
ninetyandnine.com
Article © Alicia Becton, 1999
-------
Alicia Becton works in the
insurance field and coaches a Junior Bible Quizzing team in Nashville. A graduate of the University of Missouri - St. Louis, with a
Bachelor of Science degree in Applied Mathematics, she travels the country often
– though she tries to avoid the boring drive between Nashville and St. Louis
whenever possible.
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