I HATE potluck dinners.  While there are few things nicer than being invited to real dinners where the host supplies the victuals, or having folks over to my house where I do the cooking; a potluck would be better described by substituting the word 'bad' for 'pot'.  A man or woman, or a couple, deciding to host his/her/its friends might roll out something special: an upgrade to the meat they usually eat, or a great salad they discovered or a special dessert; but in the midst of the bounty, if the meat turns out to be squirrel or the salad has great slabs of wet bread, or anchovies in it, or the dessert has unfortunate lumps of unknown provenance, one can discreetly dispose of one item and concentrate on the others.  Usually the talk is interesting and no one is keeping score on how many bites one takes of something.  Anybody who knows me is aware of my aversion to fish or seafood of any kind (I make sure of it!), so I can accept dinner invitations with a serene faith that it will be largely edible, and just may be delicious.  I do seem to have whittled my acquaintance to largely good cooks who enjoy traditional food well-prepared.  This wasn't an intentional process, but maybe subconsciously I was being deft and purposeful - or I'll throw a bone to jeankfl and allow the possibility of divine intervention.   True, since I have moved to the semi-sticks, I may have to add to the  publishing of my anti-piscine bias, a rider to the effect that I also do not care to eat anything that has been shot.  This is not because I oppose hunting; with the constant attacks on my landscaping from voracious deer, I applaud hunting and offer opportunities to engage in it upon my property at all times, in season or out, to any hunter who feels that knocking off the local Bambi is a whale of an idea.  If people shot only cows and chickens and pigs and sheep - and occasionally each other - I could attend dinners at the houses of manly men or of Sarah Palin without a tremor, but sadly, when the entrée has been shot, it is always more exotic fare.  Basically anytime the meat can be described as 'gamy', please exclude me from the invitation list.  Fortunately I don't have many vegetarians in my circle, because those folks tend to fall upon innocent legumes or leafy greens which are delightfully edible in themselves and, probably from deep motives of carnivore-envy, render them by way of creative cookery into appalling messes that require removal of one's tongue, or at least the taste buds thereon, to enjoy.   

But in a potluck event (calling it a potluck dinner implies an edibility which I have never encountered), there are not a bevy of dishes concocted by the same hand.  Each guest reaches into his or her special place where he or she keeps a set of recipes (most often just one recipe actually, labelled "My specialty") and pulls forth a treasured dish that is expected to 'knock 'em dead'.  In most cases this is no idle threat.  Not only do a series of crimes against humanity appear in dishes covered with tinfoil or Saran-wrap, but the authors of these enormities have eyes for nothing save the quantity of this mess that is consumed by each and every guest.  No tucking the chocolate tuna fish and turnip dessert into one's pocket, as one might do at a normal meal, where one would not have encountered it in the first place.  No pushing the venison and prune sausage into a napkin.  Even that final refuge of the trapped at normal dinners, of taking small bites and minimizing the tongue-time given to the foreign substance as much as possible while one gulps vast quantities of alcohol or Pepsi to wash it down quickly and unchewed, because the diamond-drill eyes of the provider of that particular pot watch every movement of the jaw that holds the special treat.  

I have, this summer, begun attending meetings of a men's group over in Broome County, and everything was going along well enough until it was decided by the majority of the group that nothing would do but to have a potluck dinner - and to make this a monthly event.  Having said 'men' and 'potluck' in the same sentence, I feel it would be de trop to say this is a gay men's group.   Whereas these folks are nice enough in their way, (although I have not found the love connection for which I had secretly hoped), the group is more or less led by a vegan and his equally vegan significant other, and many of the members are of very limited income.  When a potluck among the carnivorous and comfortably circumstanced is dreadful, I can only imagine the extent of harm that can be inflicted by the flesh-deprived and the impoverished.  And imagine it I will have to do, because there is no way in hell I am going to attend this orgy.  Unfortunately the group is quite small, and if I plead a prior commitment, they are perfectly capable of re-scheduling to fit my supposed schedule.  There is no depth to which folks will not sink, once they are seized with the fever to hold a potluck.  I really think potlucks are an alternative for those who are deeply stressed to going on a shooting rampage, so fiercely do the perps cling to the plan through any sort of cavilling and demurral.  I am torn between ceasing to attend the group altogether, and rushing in with MY special dish and dropping it off and claiming a workplace emergency that calls me right back to the office instantly.  But I can't really do this every month, though; suspicions will be raised.  

Any hope that this event could be somehow endured were laid to rest at the last meeting when a guy attended whom I had not seen before.  In the endless discussion of logistics (gay men can talk anything to death once they find themselves in any kind of organizing mode), the lad piped up with, "Can we do any cooking on site here?" and went on to aver that he had a recipe he called "Poor Man's Surprise" ("and I have never found it written down anywhere!") that "everybody loves".  My heart was sinking like a mafioso encased in concrete, when he added dismissively, "unless they, like, don't like tuna fish or something."  Oh. My. God.  I don't know where the "surprise" comes in in the name of the dish, but I totally get the "poor man" part.  Poor, indeed!  Poor anybody that has to eat the shit.  Here's a tip: just as a matter of self-preservation, NEVER eat anything with the word 'surprise' in the name.  It will be a surprise all right, but not of the type for which one might hope.  More like the manner in which Pearl Harbor was a surprise.  

I have, in my long life, been trapped surprisingly often in doctors' offices where the reading material consisted solely of some dreadful medical treatise and tattered copies of Family Circle and Ladies' Home Journal.   In desperation, I have opened one of those magazines for the homemaker, and regularly found 'quick or 'easy' or 'inexpensive' recipes.  And without exception these recipes have required tuna fish and that other gross offense to the tongue, cream of mushroom soup.  These are two things that I simply will not eat.  They are disgusting in and of themselves, and combined and added to anything else they pull it down to their level.  I firmly believe you can taste a single drop of mushroom soup dropped into a vat of hot chilies.  And you can smell tuna a furlong away, even when the intervening distance includes a hog farm and a sewage plant.  What is it with women and the eating of gross substances?  

Have you ever had the pleasure of dining at the home of a woman who is on a diet?  Of course you have - despite the billows of flesh around us which would argue to the contrary, virtually all women spend large portions of their existence on diets.  Certainly single women do; there is a tendency among the married of both sexes to feel that once the deal is sealed, the advertising can be dispensed with in matters of appearance, manners and just about everything else.  The mate is now enjoined to love one for “who they really are” and not for how they look, and 'how they really are' tends to reach levels of behavior and tonnage that are not for the faint of heart.  But for those of us who are perforce single, there is a high likelihood that our friends will include a large portion of females who are similarly circumstanced.  And it is a scientific fact that in any group of three single women, one, at least, will be on a diet at any given moment.   Since few members of either sex would dream of actually eating less, the fairer sex has developed the strategem of "substituting". (Vegetarians are also adept at this - think 'tofurkey' if you can do so without throwing up in your mouth.)  So as you wanly pick at the meal served by a friend who pre-diet was a wondrous cook, she gleefully regales you with such newly-discovered dieter's secrets as "instead of beef, you just use parsnips" or '"you just replace the butter with tofu paste".  A woman on a diet is an angry woman, and everybody's gonna suffer, damn it.   (There are two other strategies engaged in by the average dieter: 1) weighing everything, which would work if they weighed it instead of eating it, but alas! they tend to do both; and 2) talking endlessly about the diet and portions and carbs and grams and slip-ups and rewards until no one is willing to come near them, which does reduce the amount of food they are offered by others, but unfortunately also results in them eating the share they had planned for the guest who sadly found an emergency that required his or her absence from the feast of dietary factoids and low-cal substitutions, at the last minute)

I had a friend (a slim friend) who was a gourmet cook - and I mean she really was the finest cook I have ever known.  She remained slim largely by cooking, which she loved better than eating, and then inviting others to eat her end results.  She was so good a cook that she actually induced me - a famously picky eater - to eat several vegetables that I had hitherto refused to even try - mostly those of the brassica family: Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli - which are now among my favorite vegetables - by making seemingly plain, but actually devilishly clever dishes from them.  Only once that I know, did she slip into the substitution mode.  She served up a faux potato salad which substituted equal measures of cooked broccoli and cauliflower for the potatoes.  The secret, she said, slipping into Family Circle mode, is using celery seed in the salad.  I loved it, although I have never been able to make mine taste as wonderful as hers did.  No matter, it is still pretty good.  It is my secret specialty.  I bring it to all the potlucks to which I am forced to go.  Everybody hates it - few people really like cauliflower or broccoli anyway.  Some take a tiny dab, but some take none at all.  

And don't let these latter folks think I don't notice.  I take names; I have a list.