I come from a long line of women who cook according to the theory that everyone is just one step away from starving to death. My mother’s family, in particular, plans for the worst no matter the occasion. If we have a family reunion, a holiday get-together or even a Sunday dinner, Hartman women cook three times the tonnage that anyone could possibly eat just to cover their bases. I admit, it’s a serious family condition. No matter how much food we have sitting on the table, warming in the oven, setting up in the fridge or freezing in the freezer, we’re all half sure it’s going to run out before people can have their third helping. Maybe it’s an example of hereditary paranoia, handed down in the Hartman line both by culture and DNA, but whatever it is, it has proven inescapable to the Hartman X chromosome.

Michele Coleman

Michele and her husband, Dave, live in southern Idaho where they boast an extensive collection of...

How do you know if you’re a carrier of the “someone just might go hungry around here if we don’t serve four kinds of cookies” gene?

• When you go on a trip, do you pack as much food by weight as you do everything else, including automobiles?
• When you go on a trip, do you ever take an extra vehicle just for cooler space?
• When you go on a trip, do you pack every kind of food that you might possibly need in case you can’t find it in the place you are going, but then end up buying still more food when you get there?

Several years back, we had a family reunion at my mom’s old stomping grounds, down in Altamont, Utah. I should say Altamont is down in Utah but also up on the Uintah Basin bench, if that clarifies anything. We rented a cabin, and Mom set about reconnecting with everyone she is related to either by fact or by tradition. Of course, all the Hartman women decided we had to have a barbecue potluck while we were in town. Just so you know, you cannot invite a Hartman woman to a meal and not have her bring something. I know a lot of hosts nowadays want to plan a meal top to bottom, control the courses, make sure all the flavors complement each other and let the guests just sit back and relax without lifting a finger. That’s just fine. Just don’t be inviting any of my people to any such get-together. We’d be miserable. We live by the unbreakable law that you never walk into someone else’s house without at least one side dish and a backup dessert in hand.

Anyway, Mom invited her cousins and their kids and their kids' kids, and you know – all the extended relatives you sort of recognize and eerily sort of look like too. The problem with such gatherings is: You never know how many people are actually going to show up. You certainly can’t predict whether they will bring potato salad or deviled eggs or chocolate cake, and so – according to Hartman protocol – you have to make some of everything just to be safe.

I think I need to take a moment to mention the men of the family. Hartman women are all about having the men cook too. Equality in the kitchen? I’m a believer. But to put it delicately, the men in my family tend to be more concerned about protein and quantity than they are about the five food groups. Frankly, they are prone to forget that side dishes even exist. I can talk about salads, fruit plates and chopped vegetables all day long, but when the men are in charge, nothing will end up on the table but meat and – well – meat. Sometimes a potato. So we put them in front of the grill, and everyone is happy.

Back to the reunion. When we first arrived, my mom and sisters unloaded their coolers, and I unloaded mine, but then we had to turn around and load half of it right back up because the cabin fridge couldn’t hold everything. Of course, each of us had brought a watermelon just in case someone else had forgotten the watermelon, and I had brought two just to be safe. Didn’t matter. We still had forgotten things. And then we decided we needed still more things. We ran to the little store in town so many times the cashiers began to think they’d known us their whole lives.

Fortunately, we had decided to keep the potluck simple, so it only took us all day to throw everything together, all casual-like. Then it was finally time to get the show on the road, and the extended-family Hartman women began to arrive. They’d probably been worried that we weren’t going to have access to everything we needed in the cabin, so they’d compensated for us. By the time everyone had unloaded their cars and pickups, we had filled every inch of cupboard space inside that cabin and every picnic table outside of it. Noah’s ark had nothing on us. We had frog eye salads and bacon broccoli salads and whipped-up candy bar salads. Pickled beets and pickled cucumbers and black olives. Potato chips and corn chips and buffalo chips. Or maybe that last one was jerky. Anyway, we had it all, and that doesn’t even address all the main dishes, casseroles and backup proteins that arrived.

It was a great event, and everyone talked and talked until we were all falling asleep on our feet. Once we were good and caught up on all the scandals, surgeries and funerals in the family, everyone went back for at least three desserts. What a day! But of course, the inevitable reckoning came. The next day, we had to face all the leftovers. The absolute worst thing about traveling with Hartman women is figuring out how to get everything back home again. Everyone at the party had done their part and eaten way more than they should have, but we still had more food than we had started with. Now we had to keep it all on ice for six hours straight and get it back to Idaho. I may have brought two watermelons, but I will have you know, I went home with three. Still, I took it as a good sign that, once again, we had managed to squeak by without having anyone waste away to nothing. At least this time around.