Maybe it’s the warm climate or the comfortable schedule. However, summertime tends to invite extra events and gatherings. Potlucks are your friend if you love having people over but don’t have fun with all the work required to prepare dinner and clean up a large feast. This informal, all-people-pitches-in affair makes life less complicated for hosts without sacrificing the meal or birthday celebration. Plus, you get the advantage of various culinary tastes and skills.
But what makes for an outstanding potluck dish? You want to electrify the group. However, you may want to make something that may be transported without difficulty and sit, thankfully, on a buffet for a while. If a recipe calls for minimum final-minute fussing, as potlucks suggest, there can be a range of cooks in the kitchen. We asked a number of our favorite top cooks and food experts, which include Giada Di Laurentiis, Andrew Zimmern, Sarah Copeland, Stacy Adimando, Teri Turner, Kevin Curry, and Kelly Senyei, to proportion their pleasant potluck dishes. With recipes for potluck-friendly mains, facets, and cakes, you’ll have everything you want for smooth summer excitement, whether you’re the host or the visitor.
“I love a summer potluck dish wherein the components may be made absolutely in advance and assembled right before the potluck starts of evolved,” says Sarah Copeland, writer of “Every Day is Saturday: Recipes + Strategies for Easy Cooking, Every Day of the Week.” “That way, the dish remains sparkling and exquisite but is still smooth to drag off,” Copeland says. This dish is satisfying and refreshing, with crispy beans, sharp pink onions, smooth potatoes, soft-boiled eggs, capers, and olives. FSherecommends making the dressing, potluck cooking the potatoes, and blanching the beans up to two days beforehand. Store everything included within the refrigerator and produce to room temperature before finishing the relaxation of the dish, which you could do up to an hour before serving.
Andrew Zimmern, the 4-time James Beard Award–triumphing TV character, chef, executive producer, and host of Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, describes this veggie-focused dish as “the perfect summertime expression of agro-dolce, the Italian concept of sweet and sour and the way those flavors play out on a plate.” He provides that caponata is simple to make in big batches and transports well, making it potluck-friendly. If viable, make the caponata a day or ahead and maintain it in the fridge to combine the flavors. Come birthday party time, serve the caponata as a salad, pair it with grilled chicken or bread, or toss it with hot or bloodless pasta.
Meatloaf would possibly seem like an iciness dish; however, while sliced and loved cold or at room temperature, it’s rather good health for summer season potlucks. You can serve meatloaf as slices or with crackers along. However, Zimmern loves it on toasted bread with onions and Heinz Chili Sauce. “The beauty of this recipe,” explains Zimmern, “is that the number of greens jumbled in offers the bloodless meatloaf a tender, cute texture.” Plus, it may be made up to three days beforehand and kept in the fridge, so it’s splendid and wonderful.
This paper-skinny flatbread, known as Carta di music, comes from Sardinia, off the coast of Southern Italy, explains Stacy Adimando, writer of “Piatti: Plates Platters for Sharing, Inspired by using Italy” and the government editor of Saveur magazine. While scrumptious drizzled with olive oil, Carta di Music additionally “make an amazing base onto which you could pile on salty cheeses and cured meats,” says Adimando. “It’s a unique and unexpected component to carry as a visitor and slightly fees anything to make birthday celebration-sized batches.” Roll and bake the flatbreads a few days ahead and hold them in an airtight container. Then, when it’s time to serve them, sprinkle on your choice of cheese, sliced vegetables, cured meats, and broil to soften the cheese.
