When is a pot not so lucky?

I went to the PTA pot luck last week. I had wanted to take meatballs. Not just any meatballs but the super yummy scrumptious ones that I had had last Christmas at the old church. I emailed the lady for the recipe and of course she didn't respond. That made me mad and sad and frustrated. Mad enough to the point that I said "the heck with it! I'm tired of the usual stuff at pot lucks anyways, lets eat something good!" So I made Asian lettuce wraps and they were super, yummy, scrumptious!

I don't really know pot lucks from my childhood. My memory is that we didn't really have people over for dinner. We had company from out of town that would come and stay for a few days usually on their way to or from another destination. My Mom would labour for days over the feasts to serve them and I'll write more about that some time later. Instead of pot lucks we went "visiting." I would like to write more about "visiting" however I'm having a heck of a time finding stuff on the Internet about it. I'm just not using the right magical combination of words for the search engine. Then I tried searching for "calling". Which was even worse and then to complicate those matters I looked for "calling cards" and you can't even begin to imagine the chaos I found.

I guess that pot lucks entered my life when I joined a church. In the young adult glory days is was often my pots and everyone else was in luck! But I do remember going to a few full fledged adult ones at some grandparentish friends and discovering grandpa Jack's chicken wings. I also remember being at one the Christmas I came back from Korea having one of grandma Jean's homemade peanut butter chocolate cups in each hand just in case there wasn't any more and because I had been deprived of them for so long.

Ahhhhhhhhhh pot lucks I have known. Or, as some people call them "pot blessings" because in some churches the word "luck" just isn't done. In his super yummy, scrumptious blog "Stuff Christians Like" (that I just can't get enough of!) Jonathan Acuff says this: "Luck is a more accurate description of the food you'll find at church events, where everyone brings their own dish. They're not all blessings some of them are gross. Upon tasting them your mouth does not think to itself, 'I have just been blessed.' It might think, 'Wow! I have just been cursed.' And now you've got a "pot cursing" on your hands, which seems like something a drunk crock pot would start doing if you bumped into it and spilled it's drink at a nightclub." //stuffchristianslike.net/2009/04/515-taking-a-sympathy-scoop-from-the-dish-no-one-eats-at-the-pot-luck/

I remember my first pot luck somewhere in Illinois, I felt like I was back in Korea with a whole array of unfamiliar dishes that I needed Huggyband to interpret for me. That was also the first time I'd encountered Red Velvet cake AKA "stuck pig cake." In Indiana I was pregnant and craving comfort food but after the first spread of covered and smothered goo that made me feel sick I learned to bring a green salad with dressing on the side so I'd at least have something I wanted to eat. In his "Rules for Pot luck" (more like a survival guide), Jeffry P. Barnes writes 4) If you are lucky enough to see a relish tray with uncooked veggies, take them. Do not worry about others having enough. Your survival is important and you must be ruthless. http://recipes.stsams.org/recipes/rulesforpotlucks.html


Totally off topic here but I just discovered some of the very old Saturday morning PSA's on youtube. You know the ones that you're STILL singing the songs to? Here's "Don't drown your food." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfEG15CLTqo My Nana insisted that the only reason cooks put gravy on their food was to cover up the bad taste of their cooking. All I can say is that if I were going to cover up bad food, white gravy would not be what I would pick to do it with! Brown gravy on the other hand only goes to enhance the flavor of already yummy things like poutine.

Anyways.......... Pot lucks in the south were very adventuresome and required A LOT of interpretation. The good stuff was very, very good. Little Miss Teen used to look forward so much to Miss Shelby's broccoli, cheese cornbread that we affectionately began to call church pot lucks "feast days." Except for the bad the bad stuff........... I once heard a man scold his daughter for not eating anything and when I glanced over at her plate and saw all those boiled greens I honestly couldn't blame her! Our favorite, "not our favorite" dish was white bread and watermelon or pineapple sandwiches. They were just as they sound, white bread, a slice of pineapple or watermelon and a lot of mayo. As Barnes writes, 2) Avoid potato salad, or anything else with mayo in it unless you have seen it come out of the refrigerator. Avoid it totally during hot weather.


Honestly I've probably been the bringer of more pot curses as I have the recipient. I'm a great cook but sometimes accidents do happen. Like the time I dusted a cake with cornstarch instead of icing sugar. There was also the time I made a great spinach salad. I thought it was great, everyone else thought it was great, except for my best friend, who, not knowing that I had brought it, took a bite and pronounced "WHAT IS WITH THIS SPINACH SALAD IT'S HORRIBLE!" And sometimes I've brought the dish that nobody eats. Some friends of mine recently talked about what foods "go" at a pot luck and what foods don't. We agreed that elaborately decorated cakes don't. This I learned at Christmas after spending a lot of time on a cake that I took to a pot luck and then brought back untouched. Good for my family; bad for my ego. I've been told that very gracious kitchen ladies will do the kind if not Christian thing when they see this happen and very discreetly throw half of the dish in the trash so it looks like it's been eaten to preserve face. I've also been told that pies "go." This is probably because homemade pies are rare these days so people tend to snap them up when they can. I've seen great pies be snatched up even before they hit the bake sale table. I've also learned the hard way that the people of Ohio are gingersnap haters. Go figure! Go back to Stuff Christians Like to see what you should do if you are in fact the bringer of a pot curse.

One of the ways to take the "luck" out of potlucks is to have each dish designated. One of my friends got a note from the lady's guild at church telling her to bring cherries jubilee to the chicken dinner. Not only did she not know what chicken dinner they were talking about but she had NO clue what cherries jubilee was or how to make it! I'm also not a fan of the alphabetical divide. You know last names starting with A - G brings side dishes, H - R brings main course and the rest bring desserts. Well, I'm a W and like I said some days I'm in the mood to bring a salad. Or spicy Asian lettuce wraps that went over real well. It was a lucky pot luck day for sure.

And in case you're ever in need of something very yummy to take to a pot luck, here's the link http://www.grouprecipes.com/110886/asian-lettuce-wraps.html