Side Dish Ideas for an Office Thanksgiving Potluck? Good Questions

Q: Help! My office is having a Thanksgiving potluck. I need to bring a side dish or appetizer to share with about 30 people. I am looking for something that can be served at room temperature since we only have 2 small microwaves in the office kitchen.

Any suggestions?

Sent by Amy

Editor: Amy, we would suggest something like the rolls pictured above; they're really wonderful and wouldn't need to be heated up. People love fresh bread! You could even take along some honey butter or browned butter to spread on top.

If you have a slow cooker, you could also use that to keep mashed potatoes or sweet potatoes warm.

Those are just a couple of ideas. Readers -- what would you suggest?

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(Image: Faith Durand)

Comments (10)

My husband presented me with a similar situation, as his office is having 2 potlucks and he can not cook...

I plan to make 2 of the folllowing:

arugula salad with beets, pecans, apples, and goat cheese.

chocolate cupcakes with chocolate orange frosting and candied orange peel on top.

chocolate cookies with white chocolate chips.

Devilled eggs. Not very Thanksgiving-y, but people love them, and they don't require any heating. Most everyone will get plenty of traditional Thanksgiving fare later this week.

A couple years ago, I took a delicious salad to a Christmas party - it was greens, sauteed pears, toasted pecans and blue cheese with a honey mustard vinaigrette. People loved it.

Or, I would take something in a slow cooker.

The carrot salad of this recipe for a "trio" of salads is great.
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Trio-of-Salads-4611

The fairly simple vinaigrette that goes with it is great and people are constantly surprised to try a carrot salad not involving raisins.

A little less convenient but don't forget about roaster ovens since they are portable. You can certainly heat something up that needs a real over that way.

One of my favorite, most easy appetizers is to mix salsa into a brick of cream cheese, add garlic powder to taste, spread inside tortillas (lightly) and roll them up. Refrigerate for a few hours, or overnight if possible, and then cut into 1" or so rounds. It's delicious, easy finger food!

Those rolls pictured make me think of my mom's go-to potluck offering: ham rolls. She'd buy a huge grocery store name (usually maple pre-cut) and cook it up for our Sunday lunch; the leftovers went on her better-than-Sister-Schubert's homemade yeast rolls as little ham roll sandwiches. Mustard optional. I never actually got one at any potluck, because they were always gone too fast!

I recently had an office thanksgiving potluck, and it was really sad not to have stuffing, mashed potatoes, or sweet potato casserole.
But some enterprising people managed to keep their sides warm by cooking them in the morning and storing them in those awesome thermal bags or in pyrex portables. They only required a brief nuke to get them table ready, and really would have been fine without.
So this is one vote for mashed potatoes or stuffing (or dressing i suppose) baked in the morning and kept nice and warm in a slow cooker or thermal bag.

You could make cornbread dressing in a crock-pot. If you have one, that would be an easy thing to do because you just make the cornbread, preferably the day before, and after that it's all mix and let it cook. There's lots of recipes out there for this.