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I think I talked a little about this before, but my church is trying out a new hospitality approach this year, wherein the congregation is split into four 'teams,' each of which runs greeting and ushering and coffee hour and sanctuary decorations and such-like for four or five weeks at a time on a rotating schedule. My team's slot is coming up again -- I believe we have the last two weeks of March and the first two of April -- and so we had a potluck dinner/planning session on Saturday evening.
Attendance was much sparser than at our introductory dinner session last year, but we made some plans and had some good conversation over good food, so I count it a success.
I successfully timed my pot roast to finish cooking at 4:30pm, after which I wrapped the tupperware container (plus ladle and serving dish) in several towels and headed off for church. While walking, I ran into Arthur, my team's leader (who has also been a co-teacher of mine in past years), at which point he offered a ride and I figured it would be silly to say no, especially when my only real reason was that I wanted to take a photograph of Cascadilla Creek from the Tioga St. bridge for my continuing documentary photo project. So I ended up arriving a bit early and doing a lot of the physical setup -- tables and chairs and dishes and silverware and such -- since it turned out that our intended room had already been set up for the Sunday noon pledge drive kickoff brunch. Whoops! I also did the majority of dish washing after the meal, because I genuinely like washing dishes.
I have now learned that when bringing food to potlucks (at least in Ithaca), my cheesy potatoes with stuff in dish goes over a lot better than pot roast. This is weird, since I make an awesome pot roast, but I guess a mostly vegetable-and-carbohydrate dish seems, I dunno, healthier/greener than an explicitly meat-based dish, even though I put an awful lot of onion and carrot into my pot roasts and the potato dish has a fair bit of cubed ham. Maybe it's the relative visibility of all ingredients in the potato dish, versus a dish where everything is smothered in opaque brown gravy?
Oh well, I came home with delicious leftovers so it's my gain and everyone else's loss. :-)
Anyway, I have signed up to do coffee hour cleanup on all of the Sundays in question. This will A) get me out of the house, B) make me feel productive and supportive and stuff, and C) save me from having to do heavy human-contact jobs like greeting. A win all around, I think.
Attendance was much sparser than at our introductory dinner session last year, but we made some plans and had some good conversation over good food, so I count it a success.
I successfully timed my pot roast to finish cooking at 4:30pm, after which I wrapped the tupperware container (plus ladle and serving dish) in several towels and headed off for church. While walking, I ran into Arthur, my team's leader (who has also been a co-teacher of mine in past years), at which point he offered a ride and I figured it would be silly to say no, especially when my only real reason was that I wanted to take a photograph of Cascadilla Creek from the Tioga St. bridge for my continuing documentary photo project. So I ended up arriving a bit early and doing a lot of the physical setup -- tables and chairs and dishes and silverware and such -- since it turned out that our intended room had already been set up for the Sunday noon pledge drive kickoff brunch. Whoops! I also did the majority of dish washing after the meal, because I genuinely like washing dishes.
I have now learned that when bringing food to potlucks (at least in Ithaca), my cheesy potatoes with stuff in dish goes over a lot better than pot roast. This is weird, since I make an awesome pot roast, but I guess a mostly vegetable-and-carbohydrate dish seems, I dunno, healthier/greener than an explicitly meat-based dish, even though I put an awful lot of onion and carrot into my pot roasts and the potato dish has a fair bit of cubed ham. Maybe it's the relative visibility of all ingredients in the potato dish, versus a dish where everything is smothered in opaque brown gravy?
Oh well, I came home with delicious leftovers so it's my gain and everyone else's loss. :-)
Anyway, I have signed up to do coffee hour cleanup on all of the Sundays in question. This will A) get me out of the house, B) make me feel productive and supportive and stuff, and C) save me from having to do heavy human-contact jobs like greeting. A win all around, I think.
