Every year during the holidays, my co-workers and I have a dinner at one person's house. There are eight of us in the firm, and the four of us partners provide the food and drink in potluck fashion, and we invite our associates to enjoy and not worry about bringing anything. My partners and I always have fun beforehand coming up with the menu, and everyone commits to bringing a certain dish or dessert, and we're careful to coordinate so we have everything covered for a nice sit-down meal. The last two times have been at my house, since I have the biggest dining room and all the china and serving dishes and such.
Anyway, this past time, we had agreed to a menu of salad, spiral cut ham, scalloped potatoes, steamed broccoli, corn, rolls, various desserts, sparkling wines and ciders, etc. I had the house and dining room festively decorated, and it was going to be a very nice dinner. One of my partners, we'll call her Ditzy, had committed to bring the salad and rolls. However, on the night of the dinner, she arrived a little late. She said she hadn't had time to make a salad and rolls, so she had run through the drive-thru at Captain D's (a fastfood seafood restaurant) and picked up a tub of cole slaw and an order of six small hushpuppies. Knowing Ditzy as I do, this did not surprise me, and I was prepared with salad fixings and rolls just in case. I was tempted not to serve the cole slaw and hushpuppies, since they really didn't go with the meal, but I thought that would be rude, so I did serve her offerings in nice serving dishes. But no one touched them, not even Ditzy.
So have any of you ever run into the same sort of adventures in potlucking? Do you normally try to keep enough on hand to take up the slack for someone who does not bring what they said they would bring?