Burned out
Jennifer's sister got married this weekend and we were asked to cater the wedding. We all settled on going italian because it seemed the easiest to make and most everyone likes italian. The menu consisted of 4 gallons of meat sauce, 4 gallons of marinara sauce, 6 pounds of cooked spaghetti noodles, 8 vegetable lasagnas, 8 meat lasagnas, salad and quiche. That's a lot of food in case you didn't know.
Jennifer started cooking the day before the wedding and cooked 8 batches of sauce which we refrigerated until needed. The morning of, Jennifer's mom cooked all of the lasagna's and I cooked the noodles. I tossed the noodles in olive oil once cooked and put them in aluminum trays that I could just throw into the oven to reheat. Once I was done I loaded up the car, grabbed the lasagnas, and headed over to the church. I got there about 3 hours early and set up because I wanted to keep everything as organized as possible.
The church they got married at was pretty old and their kitchen looked to be older than my dad but was serviceable for the night. One of the burners on the stove didn't work at all and another one only cooked at high temps. I started reheating the sauce about an hour before I was going to serve it and prepared all of the quiches. The quiches and lasagna's were bought from Costco so fortunately I didn't have to do much more than throw them on a tray and put them in the oven. The only tricky part was trying to juggle everything so that there would be enough food for everyone.
Everyone arrived in the hall about 7 o'clock and then things got nuts. The quiche were the appetizers so I had to get those out first. After that I had to heat some of the lasagnas and noodles in order to get them to the people that were serving. After about an hour or more of this everyone was done getting seconds and I was finally able to eat. Finally being able to taste what we were giving out, I felt a bit of relief because it was actually pretty good. The lasagna wasn't rubbery like I thought it might be after reheating and the noodles were edible.
All in all I think everyone had a good time. I was wrecked after all of this because I was pretty much a one man show and I didn't get an opportunity to sit down for over 4 hours. Here is a link to the marinara sauce we made which is a really easy and good recipe to make instead of using the canned stuff:
Also on a side note, we don't plan on eating italian for a long time. Smelling the sauce for two days and testing noodles the whole day has really turned me off to the greatness of that particular style of cooking. I'm hoping this won't last long though because we both enjoy italian a lot and it would be a shame to miss it from our diets for too long.