In that exact order.
For many in my generation the steps were slightly modified, but generally the same. I had this unrealistic expectation that my kids would go through this process in essentially the same order, and I had this vision of when each of them would be going through each phase.
I was all set.
But, today’s youth are presented with an entirely different environment, and the order of those life-defining events seems to be entirely fluid. Not only that, my kids aren’t all moving through those stages at anywhere near the same pace. So it came as something of a shock to me when my sixth child was the first to get married last Fall. We started off 2018, on New Year’s Day, with the second Hectic Clan wedding…and that was kiddo number four. And to throw me more off my game, they got married in Annapolis, MD but opted to have two receptions…one in each of their hometowns. And to further unsettle me, they held off celebrating their receptions until this April.
It just goes to show that you can’t plan ahead…no matter how hard you try.
This will be the second wedding reception where I’m making the meal. While this may baffle a lot of my readers, I’m really looked forward to the process. The first time around, we were expecting in the neighborhood of 300. While I’m used to cooking for groups ranging from ten (our normal small family gathering) up to 80 (our extended family), cooking for 300 was a totally different story. For this reception we were expecting somewhere in the vicinity of 150 guests. Of course, most of the folks who were invited aren’t the kind to RSVP, so we had to guess to see how many actually would show up. But suffice it to say that I planned to cook for about 150.
We’d spent quite a bit of time working through the menu, and since I’m did all the cooking, I figured I’d also blog about it. So here’s the skinny on what we served:
Generally I rely on two sources for recipes…the ones I’ve gathered over time and stored in Evernote and those that I can find through a Google search. This time around I was a bit smarter and added Pinterest to my search mix. I even created a board for the recipes I wanted to investigate, since my cooking style usually involves melding several recipes into the final product. While my stock recipes were useful and Google was a helpful, Pinterest was an absolute treasure trove of great ideas and helpful information.
We served buffet style, so there wasn’t any plating involved. That also meant we had a lot less control over the quantity of food that people chose. As with any large group gathering, there was a lot of guesswork involved. A significant amount of luck was required to pull this off without issues. Fortunately things went really smoothly.
In a future post I’ll update you with the recipes I used.
Fortunately, the entire endeavor went off very smoothly and we had a wonderful time. With a lot of prior planning, I was able to make it a great day in the kitchen as well as at the reception!