Catering Your Own Wedding Reception

Catering your own wedding reception can save you a ton of money. In an age of $4 a gallon gasoline, and $5 for a gallon of milk, having an expensive wedding is out of the question for many unless you can get some help from family and friends.

You can do this. A wedding does not have to be professionally catered for it to be a big success. As long as you have good food and you are prepared, your wedding can be terrific if you cater it yourself. You just need some organization and help from some loved ones.

Gather your wedding party and close family members and brainstorm food ideas. Tell them what you would like and then listen while they tell you what they think they can do to help you. Don't be demanding. If you know that your Aunt Sally makes wonderful Swedish meatballs, don't deman that she make some exotic and expensive roast beef dish. Let her make the Swedish meatballs. (By the way, I love Swedish meatballs and if you serve them at your wedding, please invite me!)

When I say "catering your own wedding reception", I mean you can get together with some family members and close friends, plan the menu, prepare the food, and assign some of the group to serve it.

The bride and groom and their parents will be far too busy during the reception to actually serve food. Instead of a sitdown dinner, you may want to serve the food buffet style, allowing your guests to go through a line and choose their own food. A few servers will need to keep replacing empty food dishes and put out fresh plates and utensils.

My grandmother and her sisters catered my mother's wedding in this way. My mother tells me it was wonderful and the food was fabulous. Not only did my grandmother cook some of her famous dishes for the wedding, but she also baked the wedding cake! Wow! Her talents sure did not rub off on me!

Plan the menu with your mom and some other relatives who love to cook. Keep it simple. Just make sure you will have plenty of food for the guests.

Ask close friends and family who are wonderful cooks if they will make their specialties. Most cooks have one or two dishes that they are famous for and love to make. This makes for a wonderful wedding potluck. You can serve a variety of delicious homemade foods this way and your guests will have a lot more choice. Crockpots are great for keeping food warm.

You can keep the drinks simple by offering coffee, iced tea, water, and punch or lemonade. Again, several people will have to be assigned to keep making and putting out new drinks, ice, and cups.

If you are having an outdoor picnic-style wedding, you can serve canned sodas and bottles of water in ice chests and hand each family a picnic basket of food. Or you can hand each guest his/her own small basket of food as each guest goes through the line. This is actually a very simple way of catering your own wedding reception. Everything is packed up ahead of time in baskets, or pretty cardboard boxes.

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