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Family Daze
The finger food was right for available dinnerware
By Debbie Farmer
My husband and I have fallen in with a bad crowd. Most people who want to have fun go dancing, or to a movie, or hang out, tailgating at sporting events, but we don't have those sorts of people as friends. Noooooo. Our friends throw progressive dinner parties.
For those of you who have been preoccupied with fast-food toys all year, a progressive dinner is a type of reverse potluck where, instead of food being brought to one designated spot, it remains stationary and a different course is served at each house.
Now this is all well and good, especially if you're the type of person who likes to cook for a large group of people. If you ask anyone who's ever been to my house for dinner, I clearly am not. However, my friends assured me that it would be fun. Apparently they don't know how close to starvation they may be coming.
For a week we called back and forth. I was fascinated since it's the first time I've been able to think about food preparation so long without drifting into a coma. Should we have a Hawaiian theme? Or fun hats? Karaoke? '70s music? And how many minutes per house? Does this include travel time? The government should be run as efficiently as this meal.
At the end of the week we met at a restaurant to firm up our plans over dinner. I was beginning to get the feeling that everything would go a whole lot smoother if I was the type of person who owned 12 full sets of matching china, instead of a few plastic plates and a box of cups with riddles on the front.
"How about being in charge of the salad course?" my friend Lee asked me.
"Great," I said. "But I only have five good salad forks and a chewed plastic spoon that I think used to be in the shape of Minnie Mouse."
"Dessert?" she tried.
"Six matching bowls, seven if I count the cat's water dish," I said. "But I bet it would clean up real good."
I finally got stuck being in charge of the hors d'oeuvres. Now that just shows my bad attitude. I shouldn't say "got stuck." It might not be so bad, it being a course where everyone could eat with their fingers. Besides, everyone would arrive at our house first so there wouldn't be any high expectations to live up to.
However, as hard as I tried, I couldn't think of anything to make that I could serve to people I considered friends. So I looked through an old Betty Crocker cookbook and found out she highly recommended "canapés." Now, normally this wouldn't have been a problem, except the only canapés I ever heard of usually hung from the tops of windows to block the sun. And I had a feeling this wasn't what Betty meant.
I was just about ready to call the whole thing off and make friends with a new crowd who preferred to eat their meals like normal people--in restaurants. But at the last minute I gave in and went to the nearest grocery store, bought three trays of buffalo wings, and peeled off the price tag.
I figured it might not be so bad. After all, with a little luck everyone would be so busy eating they wouldn't have time to forage through the kitchen or look in any cabinets and see how we really lived. Besides good friends are hard to find, and I can always hold onto the hope that maybe, just maybe, next time we all wanted to do something fun together, we'd go line dancing instead.
Debbie Farmer can be contacted at familydaze@home.com.
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Saratoga, California Since 1955
