Potluck Karma At Pacific Gardens

As those of you who have been following this blog for a while know, Pacific Gardens has potlucks on a regular basis - usually once a week.

We also have some fabulous cooks, and even a chef, our fabulous Mykl Love, who does amazing feats of cookery with not-so-common ingredients such as nettles and spelt.

So it's always a treat to enter the dining-room on Thursday nights when we have our community potluck and see what's spread out on the table for us to eat.

Our potlucks are truly spontaneous - sort of like us.  We do not plan ahead for what we're going to have, or try to calculate the number of servings. People bring what they feel like.

And that's what makes it so interesting.  We never know what the special dish of the evening is going to be - a super salad, a yummy dessert, a hearty soup, fish, meat or fowl.

I've noticed, though, since we all started eating together, there seems to be some kind of potluck karma operating, as if we were a bunch of collective Jamie Olivers working in the same kitchen.

Some of it I can understand - on warm summer evenings people will naturally want to eat lots of salads and fresh fruits instead of exerting themselves over a hot stove.

But at other times, it's the battle of the borschts, with five different kinds of the tasty beet soup on the table, or yams fried, roasted, mashed and baked, pickles sweet, sour, mustard, dill, crinkly or sliced.

A few weeks ago everyone brought pasta. Clearly, there was a deep carb deficit in the psyche of Pacific Gardens, as it was followed the next week by an excess of desserts, so many there were leftovers - and believe me, that doesn't happen often.

I'm wondering what it's going to be tonight!

Kathryn