When I was a young lad in high school and college, most of the parties I went to revolved around red, plastic cups and large, cold keg of beer. Often, the keg was perched on a bed of ice, inside a plastic Rubbermaid garbage can. Even in the dead of winter my friends and I would huddle around these kegs, freezing our (&@^*es off doing our best to score a free cupful of the cheapest, skunked beer in the midwest. Oh, how I long for a return to those simple days of my youth.
As I grew older, the parties I attended grew in their sophistication. Now, instead of huddling on a creeky porch fighting for a cup of cheap beer, we huddled inside the kitchen, fighting over cheap wine and cheese. We were somewhere between sophisticated urban adult and college slacker.
Gradually, I began a slide (descent?) into greater adulthood. I started a 401K. I lost flexibility and grew winded climbing a flight of stairs. In a word, I was aging. But did the partying stop? No, kind sir….it did not. But it did ‘evolve’.
Nowadays, I find myself being invited to dinner parties more than keg parties. And I struggle with each invite to decide on what to bring. Because as we all know: When invited to a dinner party (where someone is slaving in a kitchen all day and all night), the only thing you should not bring is a big appetite and an empty armful. You must bring something. A bottle of wine is fine, but it also says, “I didn’t know what else to bring.” My advice, therefore, is to come up with a ‘go-to’ item to bring to a potluck party whenever you’re invited. As in: Go to this item when in doubt. If you’re totally unimaginative and can’t think of your own items, feel free to plagiarize the list of items I’ve been using as my descent into adulthood has increased in speed and intensity:
- [insert seasonal fruit] cobbler. Yes. Bake something you lazy bum. Your host will be impressed and you’re 100% guaranteed to be invited back.
- Hummus (easy to make, won’t spill in the car, tastes good, takes effort, and you become known as “the Hummus expert”)
- Cheese (only high-end cheeses work for this one. i.e., don’t bring a hunk of velveeta or slices of American. No…it’s not cool that they’re still individually wrapped)
- Any type of meat on stick (kebobs, corn dogs, etc.)
- Anything salty that encourages further liquid consumption.
That’s my list. What’s yours?