The weekend before last (not last weekend, which was the beginning of the Jewish harvest holiday of Sukkot, but the weekend before that, which included Yom Kippur - many, many Jewish holidays this time of year), I attended four potlucks. It was, granted, a sort of a three-day weekend (if you include Yom Kippur as "weekend.") This isn't much of a mitigating circumstance, though, since on one of those days I wasn't eating.
Potlucks are a staple of my social life these days, which I love - there's something very reassuring about being about to bring a bowlful of something good when you're going to hang out with a group of people you may not know very well - kind of a silent but delicious testimony to your status as a person it might be worth getting to know. Or at least a testimony to your status as a person who plans ahead sufficiently to cook something in advance, and who knows her way around a kitchen.
You also get to know other people through the food that they bring. I've been passing judgement in the supermarket check-out line for years ("Imported plums, organic aged parmesan, and frozen thai dinners at whole foods? - are you spending your *entire* paycheck on groceries?" "Twelve individual nonfat yogurt cups and seventeen cans of catfood - I can not picture your dinner routine. At all.") and similar judgementalism is possible at potlucks. There are the Responsible Organizers (three gallons of nutritious lentil stew), the Traditionalists (pans of ziti), the Improvisers (various chopped-up vegetables, nuts, and grains, doused with either soy sauce or tomato sauce), the Damnit-I-Forgot-I-Was-Going-To-A-Potluck Types (artisan breads from wholefoods). Fortunately, it is possible to like all of these people. A meal cannot be made on bread (or nutritious lentils, or ziti, or Mystery Stew) alone. Such is the beauty of potlucks - somehow everybody's idiosynchratic cooking/foraging turns out a balanced, plentiful, delicious meal.
But my weekend: I attended potlucks for Shabbat dinner, Shabbat lunch, pre-Yom Kippur-fast and post-Yom-Kippur-fast. All of the cooking had to be done on Thursday night and on two hours on Sunday afternoon. (To add to the mix: I also made granola that weekend, and cookies for the kind souls who helped put up our sukkah.) And so I multitasked, and picked easy recipes, and also was late to at least one of the meals.
On Thursday night, after dinner, I assembled a double recipe of lentil-bulgur salad from the Moosewood Cookbook. This is my Absolute Favorite Potluck Recipe Ever, because it's fairly quick to make, meant to be served cold, transportable in a bowl (major advantage over a casserole dish, which is harder to transport) and also full of protein (which is a plus in pasta-and-salad-heavy potluck situations). You boil the lentils, soak the bulgur, throw everything else in a bowl, and voila - perfect food in no time. I brought half of this assemblage to tikkun leil shabbat on friday night, and the other half to a potluck at a friend's the next afternoon, where someone commented that "didn't you bring a lentil dish to a potluck last winter?" In fact, yes. The same one. But I don't think it ever gets. old. :c)
When I got home from teaching hebrew school on Sunday, I had approximately an hour and a half to make food for both a pre-fast feast and a break-fast, bookending the Yom Kippur fast. Unfortunately I wanted to make something filling and good-for-you for pre-fast, but "traditional food" had been requested for the break-fast, which translated, to me, as my mom's incredible noodle kugel. Good-for-you is not a (compound) adjective that I'd use to describe my mom's kugel, which contains, among other things, a pint of sour cream, a stick and a half of butter, and five eggs. So for pre-fast, I made whole-wheat pasta with tomatoes, kale, and cannelini beans, and I made the kugel for the break-fast. After chopping a whole lot of onions in an attempt to make the pasta first, I realized that kugel needs an hour to cook and dropped the vegetables in favor of various dairy products. I accidentally got little bits of kale in the lemon zest for the kugel. Two hours later, I left the hot kugel steaming on the stove, grabbed a bowlful of pasta-and-kale, and ran for the metro, arriving just in time to eat lots of delicious food before being twenty minutes late for kol nidre, the first prayer of the holiday. And twenty-five hours later I had arrived at potluck number four, surrounded once again by things like hummus, fresh figs, roasted root vegetables, and pumpkin pie, and I broke my fast on a large wedge of kugel.
Below is the recipe for lentil-bulgur salad, which will serve you well, wherever in the potluck world you roam. Adapted from Mollie Katzen's Moosewood Cookbook.
Ingredients:
(A note about these ingredients: in all of the many times I've made this recipe, I have *never* included everything. I always leave out the onion - I don't like raw onion - and at any given time, I'm missing mint, or tomatoes, or celery, or walnuts... This is okay. As long as you've got lentils, bulgur, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and some other stuff, you're good to go.)
- 1 cup of dry brown lentils, rinsed and sorted.
- 1 cup of raw bulgur wheat.
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- 1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
- 2 cloves of garlic, minced
- 2 small bell pepper, diced
- 1 stalk of celery, minced
- 1 small red onion, minced
- 2 tbs fresh dill, chopped (or 2 tsp dry dill)
- 2 tbs fresh mint, chopped (or 2 tsp dry mint)
- 1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped
- 1/4 cup kalamata olives, chopped
- 1/2 cup chopped walnuts
- 1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese
- 1-2 tomatoes, chopped
- Salt and pepper, to taste
- Cook lentils until tender but not mushy, about 25 minutes.
- Place bulgur in a bowl with 1 cup boiling water. Cover tightly and allow to sit for 15 minutes, until water is absorbed and bulgur is soft.
- Mix all remaining ingredients in a large bowl. Add cooked bulgur and lentils. Mix thoroughly. Refrigerate. Serve either cold or at room temperature. Yum.
