When you "Gotta Go," you gotta go.

Gino was asking about the hot dishes found in a MN pot-luck. All I can say is that probably 75% entail this: pasta (in any of its hundreds of derivations), spaghetti sauce, and hamburger. From these three main ingredients, I've seen people create about 10,000 different hot-dishes by adding various other ingredients and spices.

There were a couple of those last night. Another one employed the pasta, along with a few different types of beans, but that one was a Mexican style dish; it used some sort of Mexican sauce instead of spaghetti sauce.

Hamburger and potatos are also a major combination. There was also the dependable good old Mock Chow Mein; which again is hamburger, along with rice and/or Chinese noodles, celery, and oriental seasonings. If it can be kept warm in a crock pot, you'll find it at a pot-luck.

Now, that being said, the hot-dishes all basically combine ingredients put together in an orderly manner to create a lovely dish. We have a neighbor who grew up in the mountains of North Carolina (think Clampetts) who gave Mocha-momma some advice one time about cooking up some "Gotta Go Stew." She said what they do is at the end of the week, they take all the leftovers in the fridge, throw it all into a pot, warm it up, and voila---Gotta Go Stew, cause it's all gotta go. My thought is that if you do this, within about 1/2 hour, you'd really gotta go, a beeline right to the toilet.