T Minus 2 Days and Counting

The cooking frenzy begins! Our planned menu for our buffet dinner was:

-Salad Bar (spinach and/or lettuce plus lots of chopped tomatoes, bell peppers, mushrooms, celery, corn, red onions, carrots etc.)

-Soup “Bar” (two soups—Creamy Corn with roasted red pepper and a Tom-Yum Thai soup ordered from a local restaurant, and it really is yummy-yum-yum)

-Carrots with Coriander*

-Rosemary Potatoes (bought at Costco)

-Steamed then chilled broccoli with a yogurt-ginger dressing*

-Quinoa pilaf

-Tabouleh*

-Whole Roasted Pig (20 lbs; ordered form a Chinese BBQ restaurant)

-4 Roast Ducks (3 cut up, 1 kept whole for presentation; ordered with pig)

-Whole poached (then chilled) salmon

-Chicken with yogurt*

-Spanish Potato Omelets*

-Steamed Asparagus (served chilled)

-Octopus Salad (from a local Italian deli)

-Various and sundry items from Whole Foods deli as additional side dishes that Mr. Warrior would pick up

(*these recipes are from cookbooks written by Marian Burros which are no longer in print. But, if you are ever looking for good, simple, relatively quick and absolutely tasty recipes, she is definitely the way to go!)

So, we had to cook about 2/3’s of the foods we planned to serve and a good friend of mine was coming to spend two days with me to help me cook all of it. We had planned to start early Thursday morning, but I ended up having to go to Costco that morning to pick up 4 dozen red roses I was going to use for making my bouquet and corsages/boutonnieres and my friend ended up not arriving until after lunch. We started off with the easy stuff and steamed all the veggies that needed steaming, then stored them in the refrigerator to chill. That took only about an hour and a half. We were quite proud of ourselves and started cooking the carrots for the carrots and coriander dish. When that was done, we started on the tabouleh. That went great until we realized that the corn oil had gone rancid! Of course, we didn’t realize this until we had already added it to the 6 cups of soaked bulgur. Luckily, the oil was poured more or less in the middle of the bulgur and we were able to dig out all the affected kernels, so we didn’t have to completely start over. By the time we finished the tabouleh it was near 11pm and I still had to make my bouquet. I knew it would never get done if I put it off until the day before the wedding, so we broke out my trusty how-to book and sat down to make it. It turned out pretty wonderful and I was very proud of the fact that it only took about $10 worth of roses to do it. I had gotten a quote from a wholesale florist and was quoted $250 for a duchess rose bouquet! Here is a picture of it taken the day after the wedding:

It was a lot of fun just talking and hanging out with my friend while we made the bouquet, but I was quite tired by the time I got to bed by 1AM. Lots more food needed to be cooked and more people would be arriving the next day. I was already more than exhausted. I wasn’t sure at this point how I was going to be awake enough to make it through the wedding ceremony that was supposed to take place in about 40 or so hours. And did I mention that we hadn’t figured out what exactly was going to happen at our ceremony and had no ideas what our vows were going to be? We were having a civil ceremony using a friend of ours who got “appointed” (i.e. fill out a form and pay $50 to the state of California) to be a Deputy Marriage Commissioner, who would then have the legal power to marry us. The paperwork we got stipulated that the only things that needed to happen during the ceremony was that we each had to say we would take the other as husband or wife and the Deputy Marriage Commissioner had to announce he had the power to marry us and proclaim us husband and wife. Although we wanted a simple ceremony, a three sentence ceremony just wasn’t going to cut it. But, we had no idea (or the time to think of ideas) of what else we wanted to have in the ceremony.

So, let’s recap. With 40 hours left to go, we still had half the food to cook, the tent for the ceremony to put up, the patio where we would have tables for dinner to clean up because it was a mess and filled with Christmas and other decorations, still in their original packaging. We had the clever idea of turning one of our bedrooms into a kid’s room, but it was still filled with 78 pots of poinsettias. These poinsettias were going to double as wedding decoration and wedding favors. Another clever idea, but they were taking up way too much space at this point and getting in the way of all the last minute preparations. Basically, we had a house and backyard/patio full of clutter with too little food to feed the 80 people that were going to start descending upon us.

Any bets as to how much we actually got done before the ceremony?