Not a food, but a behavior. At a potluck at which it was known there would be a number of guests who were vegan, someone thoughtfully supplied a vegan pasta salad. It looked very good, and pasta salad with veggies probably has to be an easy vegan recipe anyway … so it’s on the buffet, and some people who were not vegan wanted to sample it. Another guest (not the hostess, and not the person who brought it) took it upon herself to stand over the vegan pasta salad and shriek at any non-vegan person attempting to take some. I think the impulse was to make sure that the vegan guests had enough to eat as they couldn’t eat much of the other food … but it was absolutely awkward and uncomfortable and resulted in people slinking away from the buffet table. And there was a reasonable amount left at the end, too.
Oh, also it was the meal after a funeral. Good times.
Ugh, my mom made litter box cake for one on my birthday parties when I was a kid; one look and I vomited. :eek: I still don’t understand what the fuck she was thinking when she made it.
No matter what family pot luck, a dear sweet aunt always brings her terrible tuna/rice dish.
It looks good, so I’ve been fooled a couple of times, took a bite and yuck! Tastes like warm cat food with parsley. There’s always a ton of it left.
Took a big helping of what I thought was green beans. It was nopales. Not bad exactly, but not what I was expecting.
Like california jobcase I too would have enjoyed trying a wide variety of baked beans. My dad and I who both loved the awful jello-whipped topping “salads” that were so popular in the midwest (sorry) once went to a potluck where fully half the dishes were these, a wide variety, and about half of the remaining dishes were desserts, including two or three vanilla pudding. Lovely day for overdosing on sweets.
We always had oyster dressing for Thanksgiving. Elementopy, I expect your aunt-in-law didn’t rinse the oysters well. There’s often some “stuff” inside the oysters that tastes a bit musty and needs to be rinsed out. (I kind of try not to think about what it is.)
A family brought what looked like a rich chocolate pound cake to our neighborhood picnic. I watched a couple of kids take big slices before I took one myself - turns out it was a vegan carob cake. It was labeled as such on the cake plate, but the label had gotten pushed aside. I bet those kids were as disappointed as I was.
That was my reaction to the OP as well. I don’t enjoy cooking to begin with, and I’m not going to waste my time preparing a big dish or tray of something if the self-appointed culinary police are just going to have a conniption because the frosting wasn’t made from scratch, or I used a metal spoon with the pasta, or didn’t have the right kind of brie.
My potluck disappointments didn’t come in eating bad food. Quite the reverse!
I’ve been severely disappointed several times when I made and brought some EXCELLENT dishes to potluck dinners, and found that almost nobody ate them!
That is, I’ve spent a lot of time and effort making a really good cake, and found that everyone just ate the Oreos and store-bought cupcakes that some lazier person brought.
I’ve made excellent entrees that nobody touched, while watching everyone wolf down Costco appetizers, microwaved frozen chicken wings and cocktail weenies.
I learned the hard way long ago: when invited to take part in a potluck dinner, don’t spend much time or money on the foods you bring. Play it cheap. Most people won’t appreciate good stuff anyway.
Well I bitch about it and here’s why. One place I worked, there would be limited slots for each category, 8 for side dishes, 5 for desserts, 3 for soda, etc. Some of us love to bake but the same group of ladies would rush as soon as the list was out and take up all of the dessert slots before anyone had a chance. What did we get? Store bought cookies and pies they must have picked up that morning. After a few times of this, the office manager came up with a new rule. If you signed up in the first 24 hours it had to be a homemade item. AND it was enforced. Best potluck rule ever.
I got fed up with doing potlucks at work when it became clear that the guys who brought a bag of napkins or a couple of 2-liter sodas would be at the head of the line loading up their plates before anyone else. And those who had specialties that they made from scratch, usually at great expense, got tired of being told they needed to bring their fancy dish every time. One guy who used to bring a big platter of lumpia finally got tired of the napkin-bringers and he showed up with a cheap-ass bag of store-bought cookies - generics, no less! I don’t know if anyone else got his point, but I thought it was genius!
Evaluate your potlucks carefully. We get invited to a bring a dish champagne brunch every year, and the hostess is a chef. I’ve only been severely disappointed when my own dish doesn’t live up to standards.
The Christmas work potluck was always big on gluteny sweets and pasta salads - not being a gluten eater, I’d usually bring a risotto or something so I, and the other non-gluten eaters, could eat.
The litter box cake is sort of a classic although bringing it to a potluck is a little perverse. I’m assuming they used tootsie rolls for the realistic touch.
I encountered it at a Thanksgiving dinner once, not a potluck ( if only it had been!) but a dinner given by a relative. The dressing had oysters in it, the green beans had oysters in them, the mashed potatos had oysters in them, every freaking thing at the table except for the sliced turkey had oysters in it. Aunt Martha, some people don’t like oysters … Luckily it was a mid-afternoon meal and its a family Thanksgiving tradition to order pizza for a late night meal afterwards, so I wasn’t hungry that long.
I’ve been it that situation and its a tough one, you have a whole huge spread of non-vegan food and a handful of guests that can’t eat anything but this one dish. It does kind of suck to watch people take huge helpings and toss most of it away in favor of the Mac and cheese and fried chicken and brownies and the other stuff they’ve piled on their plates. Our solution was to not put the special vegan selections on the potluck table. Instead we stashed them in the kitchen and let the vegan crowd know where they were - and if anyone else wanted to try them they could, we just asked that they take a small taste first to make sure they really wanted it.
My most memorable potluck experience was a happy accident - my friends had the food table lit with multi-colored spotlights and there were no labels on any of the dishes ( seriously, who does that?) So the salad that I thought was tomato and mozzarella turned out the be feta and watermelon - which was delicious and something I would have never tried willingly.
Kind of a tangent here, but I’ve helped serve a lot of buffets, since I work in a cafe and we do catering.
You can’t make a spread that will satisfy everyone, so we didn’t really try. We just put out what the customer orders.
The only time I ever have regretted that is when we served a bunch of military chaplains in for a week of seminars at the psychiatiric hospital I worked at then. They had these twice a year.
Uh, not all chaplains were Christian. There was very little, except for fruits and veggies, the the Jewish chaplains could eat. And it wasn’t much better for the Muslim chaplain, although he wasn’t as bad off as the Jewish guys. I remember he politely asked what was in some of the finger food. He had to avoid anything with pork, but the other meats were OK. Now, he couldn’t drink the wine though… Nice guy, I learned some things chatting with him.
I feel your pain! See posts 1 and 25 here.
In high school I had a chocolate pound cake* recipe that was really popular. This was before most people had ever thought of putting pudding in a cake mix. It was just a white cake mix with a box of chocolate pudding dumped in, then baked in a loaf pan. Everybody loved it, but I disliked making such a “cheater’s” dish.
So one week I rushed home from church, spent the whole afternoon in the kitchen making the best darn batch of fried chicken. . . it was wonderful, and I was so proud of it.
Needless to say, all I heard throughout that potluck was “where’s the chocolate pound cake?”
I made thousands of lumpia over the years for pot luck events. They aren’t cheap to make, and they’re a pain in the ass. Other people would open a can of baked beans and heat it up, or something equally devoid of creativity and thought. One woman would always bring a two-serving container of chip dip. It gets old.
