Help me friend with food in forty-five?

Post date: 2018-10-20 07:00:10

Can you help me come up with an extremely crowd-pleasing potluck dish based on what I have on hand? Difficulty level: 45 minutes to cook.

Help! I have a potluck tonight and I don't know anyone else there and I'd like to make something crowd-pleasing but I only have about 45 minutes to cook (and an additional ~30-45 minutes to cool or defrost or whatever while I walk the dog, which I could do at any point in the process.) Sweet or savory is fine. I just really want to make people happy with food, so that I have some confidence walking into this thing!

I'd rate myself a pretty average cook - I can follow recipes well, but I'm not all that inventive myself. I have most standard kitchen equipment, and an instant pot.

Food-wise, I fortunately have a ton of stuff on hand right now. Here's what I can remember, but there's probably more:
Vegetables:
-baby red potatoes
-spaghetti squash
-sweet potatoes
-picking cucumber
-lettuce
-red bell pepper
-onions, yellow and white

Fruits:
-honeydew melon
-dragonfruit
-frozen berries, mango, bananas

Other:
-ricotta
-heavy cream (and a nifty cream whipper, if you can think of something that would lend itself to that)
-some sort of cheese (Havarti, I think, plus maybe some cheddar?)
-puff pastry (this was my first thought, but I only have 30-45 minutes to defrost it and it seems like that'd be pushing it?)
-black beans (precooked + frozen)
-nutella
-canned pumpkin

I'm very well-stocked on pantry staples and butter/milk/eggs and everything at the moment.

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