Recently I've seen a few newspaper articles about the surging popularity of potluck dinners. You know potluck where everyone brings something and magically you have food for a party.  I've never quite seen how that magic happens.  As a result, when I have a dinner party I prefer to provide all of the food and let the guests focus on enjoying themselves.  Is it about control? Is it about meal planning? Is it about hospitality?  It is probably a mixture of all, but, whatever it is I'm a strong supporter of preparing your own party food.

A couple of weeks ago, Husband and I decided to have a dinner party that was somewhat last minute.  OK - we decided to have it about 10 days before the event which is perhaps not last minute to some people, but much more last minute than we typically do.  Normally Husband helps me cook when we have a party but on this particular day he was not going to be available.  No help preparing combined with moderately short advance notice meant I allowed Husband to talk me into letting guests bring some dishes.  Surely, I could handle it... Not.

I'm not sure how other people do potluck dinners but I found it difficult to plan the party not knowing what people would be bringing, or how much they would bring.  People committed to specific types of food such as dessert or sides but not to specifics.  To me that made it difficult to provide a cohesive meal plan.  I also found it made it difficult to determine how much food would be available.  In the end, I made duplicates of some parts of the meal just to be sure things would go together and that we'd have enough. 

Yes having a full-fledged sit-down dinner party with appetizers, main courses, and dessert is a lot of work.  And yes, despite being a potluck, in this particular case the meal was great and everyone had a wonderful time.  But, to me, the planning, preparing and cooking are fun while the worrying about who would bring what was, well, stressful.  Will I have another potluck? Perhaps someday I'll try an extremely casual, outdoor, picnic like event, but count me out of the sit-down dinner party potluck club...