The Big Day... But Not Ours
I am proud to announce that on October 14, 2006 at 6:30pm my little sister Melissa got married to Caleb Trusty. It was a beautiful ceremony at Waverly Church at Fairhaven Memorial. I was the Maid of Honor and I was indeed honored to be standing there.
The food was excellent and I must commend the catering company because it just happened to be me and my husband that catered the food! We catered for about 100 people. During the whole week of October 9th I was out every single night after work buying food for the wedding. I have to just say that I think Smart & Final is even better than Costco! My sister wanted to have a cheese and meat tray and to get one made for only 30 people at Albertson’s or even Costco, it costs $26.00 a platter, which is so much money. My mom and I went to Smart & Final and ended up finding bags of already cubed cheeses and little slices of salamis for only $2.00 a bag! All we would have to do is put them on a tray with little toothpicks in them and we were set. I also found individual little butters there for the rolls; Costco doesn't’t carry anything like that! It was such an amazing find!
On Friday I took the whole day off, got up early in the morning and started cooking. I was going to make spaghetti with marinara sauce and my famous meat sauce and then we were having veggie & meat lasagna, with salad and bread. I made a total of 4 batches of each. The meat sauce took 2 ½ hours to simmer and the marinara sauce only took 1 hour. We ended up making 4 gallons each of the marinara and meat sauce. During the cooking process I was sautéing some onions for the marinara sauce and a big pop of oil came up and hit me on the nose. My nose blistered and popped rather quickly and unfortunately I had a big red spot on my nose the day before my sisters wedding! But nothing too bad that concealer couldn't handle.
On Saturday, the day of the wedding, we woke up early once again and started to cook the spaghetti noodles, which during that time my mom was busy baking the lasagna’s because our oven is off on temperature.
Gordon and I got to the church early and started to kind of set up the food stations. The plan was that Gordon would be heating up the sauces and lasagna’s and cooking up the quiches while the ceremony was going on (He doesn't’t care much for weddings). So after the wedding, Gordon had everything prepared. I was so incredibly proud of him. He worked so hard and I know it would have been so much easier if I would have been there to help. He was so self-sacrificing.
Everybody was wowed by the food, which made Gordon and I so proud, and they could not believe it was us that had cooked everything. We had plenty of food left and I found myself at the end of the night putting noodles and marinara sauce in zip lock containers and giving them to people to take home. After giving away all the left-overs that I could there was still 2 gallons of marinara sauce left, a bunch of lasagnas, tons of noodles, salad and cheese cubes. The only thing there was not enough of that night was punch and that happened to be something that Gordon and I were thankfully not in charge of! If that would have been left up to us there would have been leftovers of that also… LOL!.
This was not the first time I had cooked for a large event, however this was the first time that I supplied everything with so little help. The first time was about 7 years ago when my friend and Pastor Oden Fong was the Chaplin for the Huntington Beach police and he threw a Christmas dinner for them at the HB Library in a reception room. He had tried some of my turkey lasagna rolls and loved them so much that I was asked to cook them for the Christmas dinner. I made enough for 300 guests, however, I had at least 5 or 6 people helping me out and that was all I had to make.
But all in all and as far as everyone on the outside could see and mainly my sister, it was flawless. Sunday came and Gordon and I were completely zombified for the whole day, our bodies and brains were on shut down and it will be a long time until we ever have Italian food again! We will stick with other ethnic foods for a while.
I will be posting pictures up as soon as they come in to show all of you. My sister looked absolutely stunning, so stay tuned.
The food was excellent and I must commend the catering company because it just happened to be me and my husband that catered the food! We catered for about 100 people. During the whole week of October 9th I was out every single night after work buying food for the wedding. I have to just say that I think Smart & Final is even better than Costco! My sister wanted to have a cheese and meat tray and to get one made for only 30 people at Albertson’s or even Costco, it costs $26.00 a platter, which is so much money. My mom and I went to Smart & Final and ended up finding bags of already cubed cheeses and little slices of salamis for only $2.00 a bag! All we would have to do is put them on a tray with little toothpicks in them and we were set. I also found individual little butters there for the rolls; Costco doesn't’t carry anything like that! It was such an amazing find!
On Friday I took the whole day off, got up early in the morning and started cooking. I was going to make spaghetti with marinara sauce and my famous meat sauce and then we were having veggie & meat lasagna, with salad and bread. I made a total of 4 batches of each. The meat sauce took 2 ½ hours to simmer and the marinara sauce only took 1 hour. We ended up making 4 gallons each of the marinara and meat sauce. During the cooking process I was sautéing some onions for the marinara sauce and a big pop of oil came up and hit me on the nose. My nose blistered and popped rather quickly and unfortunately I had a big red spot on my nose the day before my sisters wedding! But nothing too bad that concealer couldn't handle.
On Saturday, the day of the wedding, we woke up early once again and started to cook the spaghetti noodles, which during that time my mom was busy baking the lasagna’s because our oven is off on temperature.
Gordon and I got to the church early and started to kind of set up the food stations. The plan was that Gordon would be heating up the sauces and lasagna’s and cooking up the quiches while the ceremony was going on (He doesn't’t care much for weddings). So after the wedding, Gordon had everything prepared. I was so incredibly proud of him. He worked so hard and I know it would have been so much easier if I would have been there to help. He was so self-sacrificing.
Everybody was wowed by the food, which made Gordon and I so proud, and they could not believe it was us that had cooked everything. We had plenty of food left and I found myself at the end of the night putting noodles and marinara sauce in zip lock containers and giving them to people to take home. After giving away all the left-overs that I could there was still 2 gallons of marinara sauce left, a bunch of lasagnas, tons of noodles, salad and cheese cubes. The only thing there was not enough of that night was punch and that happened to be something that Gordon and I were thankfully not in charge of! If that would have been left up to us there would have been leftovers of that also… LOL!.
This was not the first time I had cooked for a large event, however this was the first time that I supplied everything with so little help. The first time was about 7 years ago when my friend and Pastor Oden Fong was the Chaplin for the Huntington Beach police and he threw a Christmas dinner for them at the HB Library in a reception room. He had tried some of my turkey lasagna rolls and loved them so much that I was asked to cook them for the Christmas dinner. I made enough for 300 guests, however, I had at least 5 or 6 people helping me out and that was all I had to make.
But all in all and as far as everyone on the outside could see and mainly my sister, it was flawless. Sunday came and Gordon and I were completely zombified for the whole day, our bodies and brains were on shut down and it will be a long time until we ever have Italian food again! We will stick with other ethnic foods for a while.
I will be posting pictures up as soon as they come in to show all of you. My sister looked absolutely stunning, so stay tuned.