Weddingbee Blog

We decided to self-cater!

(source)

It’s really only half as crazy as it sounds. To be clear, by “self-catering” I do not mean that Mr. Husky and I will be cooking in our suit & gown, simply that we will have a group of willing chefs to cook & serve.

Our wedding will take place in a very small town, meaning there are no local catering options. There is a big-ish city about 20 minutes away, but it’s not exactly known for its cuisine.

In the beginning, Mr. H and I had discussed the possibility of self-catering. We even laid out a possible menu, loosely based around that of one of our favorite Portland restaurants, but it just seemed so impractical. There would be so much happening that day – did we really want to worry about the food, too?

(source)

That all changed during our tasting with a local company. They had claimed to be well-versed in the world of wedding catering, and when we mentioned some of the fare we were hoping to serve, they offered to prepare a tasting for us.

This is where it all goes downhill.

To begin, we pulled up to the address they had provided to—wait for it—a truck stop. Yes, our wedding-meal tasting was spent on vinyl-coated plastic chairs in a truck stop diner.

Our proposed menu was chosen based on the ease of preparation, and a lot of this revolved around various mac & cheeses. Before anyone panics because we’re planning on serving such a “basic” dish, just feast your eyes on this:

(not a personal photo, but making me so hungry…)

It’s really very simple to prepare. I even provided the actual recipe for the particular type we were tasting – a creamy-spicy Cajun style. My mouth watered for the entire two-hour drive, and I leaped out of the car as soon as we arrived, only to be served this:

(source)

… with maybe a little bit of cayenne pepper sprinkled in. Certainly not the creamy Cajun goodness I was hoping for. When they handed us their price-per-head estimate of $25, Mr. Husky and I exchanged a glance, and both knew that we would be doing this ourselves. I’ll soon get into more detail about how we’re planning to pull this off.

Did you have any meetings with a potential caterer that didn’t go well?