Tips on Hosting Potluck Dinner Parties

Everyone contributes to the meal at a potluck dinner.

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Throwing a potluck dinner takes away some of the pressure you feel preparing an entire meal in the kitchen, but such parties require more effort in their coordination. Taking charge of a potluck puts on your shoulders the responsibility of ensuring that the hodgepodge of dishes brought has a cohesiveness when served. A properly pulled-off potluck should be a fulfilling feast for a fellowship of friends and family.

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At least two weeks in advance of the party, assign each attendee to the potluck a dish type to bring. To have enough food for a potluck party of 10 to 12 people, Francine Halvorsen in "Crowd-Pleasing Potluck: 225 Delicious Recipes Guaranteed to Win Rave Reviews," recommends serving two or three appetizers, two side dishes, bread and butter, two desserts, one salad and one main dish to serve one dozen people. Scale the amounts up or down as needed for the event.

Pick a Theme

Establish a theme to guide the guests in choosing dishes to bring for the potluck dinner. Ideas include picnic dishes, Mexican foods, Italian foods and regional favorites. With a theme, the dishes will have a connection and the meal will not seem haphazard or ill-planned. Have recipe suggestions ready for guests who cannot think of a dish to bring.

Last-Minute Preparation

When each guest responds to the party invitation, find out the dish he is bringing and any preparation needed just before the party. Set up the table for putting potluck dishes near an electric outlet if the guest's dish must be kept warm in a slow cooker. Have plenty of ice for keeping cold dishes cold. Clean out your refrigerator to store cold dishes until serving. Have at least one serving utensil per dish for the table and plates, eating utensils and napkins for everyone coming to the party. Set aside resealable food containers for guests to take home leftovers.

Labels and Recipes

Ask each of the guests bringing a potluck dish to provide a recipe for it in case other attendees want a copy. Set stacks of the recipes on a separate table from the dishes. Label each of the potluck dishes brought to accommodate those with dietary restrictions and allergies.

References"Crowd-Pleasing Potluck: 225 Delicious Recipes Guaranteed to Win Rave Reviews"; Francine Halvorsen; 2007"How to Organize Just About Everything: More Than 500 Step-by-step Instructions for Everything from Organizing Your Closets to Planning a Wedding to Creating a Flawless Filing System"; Peter Walsh; 2004"Vegetarian Times"; A Moveable Feast; Patsy Jamieson; December 1999Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Photos.com/Getty ImagesRead Next:

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Young Adult Games for Hosting a Party

Party games liven up any gathering.

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If you are hosting a party for young adults, a few well chosen games can break the ice and help less extroverted attendees mingle with others. Try to keep games simple, so you can focus on guests instead of spending a lot of time on prep and clean up. You can give out small prizes to the winner of each game, or simply ask young adults to play for the fun of it.

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Put large plastic garbage bags on the floor. Put two folding chairs in the center of the bags, a bit apart from one another. Split young adults into two teams, and have each team seat one volunteer on the folding chair. Put shaving cream all over the two volunteers faces, in the region where a beard would usually be. Blindfold the rest of the players, give them spoons, and tell them to "shave" their seated teammate with the spoons as quickly as possible. The first team to get all the shaving cream off their teammate's face wins.

Limbo

This classic party game is perfect for loosening up young adults at any gathering. Simply put on an upbeat song, have two people hold each end of a long pole horizontally, and tell guests to take turns walking underneath the pole without bending forward or touching the pole at all. Once all the party guests have gone under the limbo pole, lower it a little to make it more difficult. Any person that touches the pole or falls down is automatically out of the game.

Don't Say that Word

Give everyone at the party two plastic bracelets to wear. Tell everyone that for the whole night, they are not allowed to say the word, "yes." If anyone catches them using the word, they have to give that person one of their bracelets. The person with the most bracelets on at the end of the party wins the game.

Famous Name Game

Tell each young person to pick one famous person to portray for this game. Have all the guests mingle, giving one another clues about which famous person they are, without coming right out and saying it. At the end of a set period of time, see if guests can correctly name the famous person each individual is portraying.

ReferencesParty Game Ideas: Grown Up Party GamesFree Party Games: Don't Say that WordPhoto Credit John Howard/Lifesize/Getty ImagesRead Next:

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Party Hosting Wine Tips

JordanSalcitoFirst and foremost, we should eat and drink things we like. When I open a wine or cook a meal, simplicity and authenticity are my guidelines.

What should I get? How much do I buy? Is it possible for a wine to be both elegant and economical? Joe Campanale and Jordan Salcito give tips and answer questions so you can ensure a party of perfect pours.See MoreTranscriptHi, I'm Jordan Salcito here with Joe Campanele at my favorite wine bar Anfora in the West Village of New York City. We are Rachael Ray's Buddies for eHow.com and we're talking about wines to serve at holiday parties. The worst thing that happens is if you're at a party and you run out of wine so something that I always like to do as a general rule is have at least one bottle for each person. Now if they're mine and Jordan's friends we might go up to two or three bottles but for most normal people if you have, if you plant for one bottle per person that should keep you covered for the entirety of the evening. Okay, so now we're having some people over for a holiday party and we decide we're going to streamline things and we're going to do one sparkling wine, one white wine and one red wine. What would be your choice for a really great sparkling wine for a holiday party? For me, during the holidays, a sparkling wine, I always go with rose. I think it just looks beautiful. It's festive, it's a little bit sort of more fruity and full in body, fruity does not mean sweet. I think it's an easier pairing if you have little bites of meat as well as chicken and certainly caviar. Now for white wines I think there's some really great values up in a small area of Northern Spain called Rias Baixas. It's a mouthful, it's really hard to say and the grape there is called Albarino but it's a really versatile wine. It has a little bit of fruit, a little bit of minerality, so it's a really good in between for people who like wines that are more flavorful and fruitful like Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc and people who don't like those sort of wines and I really think that you can get some great examples for under $15 a bottle, $10 to $15 a bottle, Rias Baixas Albarino for the whites. And for a red wine what would you serve? Well there are so many options but I think you know, one of my favorites right now and especially for a darker, a Wintry season, I'm loving Syrah and I think that you can get Syrah from the Northern Rhone Valley and you can get it from a place like Crozes-Hermitage and it's a lesser known a little bit less famous Appalachian where you get these great values. I think that's a really good point. A tip that I always tell people in order to find wine value is to choose a grape that you've never heard of, and chances are you're probably going to get a little bit more value than a very famous grape like Cabernet or Chardonnay, but Jordan's point was that if you choose a place that is a little bit more obscure, like Crozes-Hermitage, as opposed to a more famous place for the same grape, you'll also get some really great value out of it. We've talked about some of the more well-known grape varieties. What are some of your favorite off-the-beaten-path grapes? Well, you know, I just got back from a trip to the Republic of Georgia, which was a former Soviet satellite country, and they have the oldest wine making tradition in the entire world, and there are two very, very interesting grapes that are native to Georgia, one is a white grape now. It's a mouthful, be ready for it. It's called Rkatsiteli. Rkatsiteli, you've heard of it? Sounds like a rapper. Rkatsiteli, it's how they pronounce it, and they made some really interesting white wines with it. It's made in a fresh, clean, crisp style. It has a lot of minerality and it's really, really delicious, but what's really exciting is that a lot of producers are making Rkatsiteli in these ancient clay pots called anfora, and they're burying them in the ground. Anfora. Just like the wine bar, where we are, and they're making these really profound unique wines that in the industry we like to call these orange wines. They're obscure. They're made with skin contact and they're unique, but they're really, really fun, and then they have a local red grape called Saperavi. Saperavi. Saperavi, and it's reminiscent of somewhere between Cabernet Sauvignon and Syrah. It's dark and inky. It has a lot of tannin, but it's definitely in the old world style, meaning that it has a lot more Earth and acid as opposed to really, really ripe fruit. Thanks so much for watching. This is Jordan Salcito. I'm Joe Campanele. These are some of our favorite wines for entertaining for your holiday parties, and tune into eHow.com for more.CommentsPerfect Pours: Videos (8)

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