Photo Source: Google images

Occasionally, we all need “the big dish.”  You know the one I’m talking about.  That go-to dish for potlucks, family reunions and funerals. (We’re big on funeral feeds in the South.)  But it has to feed a whole bunch for not a bunch.  Know what I mean?

This tasty diddy is just the one for j that plus it uses two of my fav Arkansas products: rice and chicken.  And it’s a snap to prepare ahead of time which makes my life much easier especially during this very busy time of the year.

My Bunco group (you do have one of those, don’t you) has mostly been together since like forever.  Some of us longer than the others, but a long time nonetheless.  We’ve been together since harvest gold and avocado green, weddings and divorces, babies and grandchildren.  There are twelve of us and we try to meet on the third Monday of every month and have done that with only an occasional skip.

We started out sitting on the floor – back when doing so was only a matter of springing up to full height.  When it got to be that we had to do the old roll and push to stand up, well we decided that maybe card tables and chairs were in order.

There have been tiny dice, large-print edition dice (which even we thought were the pits), to normal-size dice.  For some reason, probably going all the way back to our sitting-on-the-floor days, we lay down sheets of poster board as a base for the rolling.  Wonder why we still do that?

For the most part, we’ve always used the same format.  Twenty-one games, counting only sixes to score.  A “bunco,” the prize in everyone’s eye, is a single roll of three sixes.  When that occurs, we all scream and cheer as if our team had just scored the winning point in the state championship  Always have.  Probably always will.

Over the years, we’ve experimented with different formats for the game — we tried the counting triple rolls thingy; we even tried the rolling in numerical order idea when we heard that’s what all the younger groups were doing.  Something about having to use a calculator to keep score made both of those seem far too complicated, so we went back to the method we knew best.

And sometimes, rarely, we get around to playing ten games rather than the twenty-one that we began with.  The visiting and catching up, the storytelling an picture sharing somehow seem to take precedence over the actual games themselves.  But that’s just fine with me.

It’s how we roll in this little group of twelve.

I’m thankful for these friends of mine.  Friends I sometimes don’t see except for these monthly “games of chance” as Hubby calls it (like we’re at some casino somewhere!), but ladies who are a part of the ups and downs of my life.

We even joke these days that we’ll have to have the nursing home buses chauffer us from home to home at some point in the future. 

You think I’m joking.

So why all this talk about Bunko?  It’s this casserole.  That’s some of what was served when I hosted these ladies this week at our house.  You see how all of that fits together, don’t you.  Of course you do.