Food is a big deal to us. On a scale of "happily apathetic" to "crazily vigilant", we probably are just about a hair shy of the "c-v" mark, passionately vigilant perhaps? Food-issues including organics, growing, subsidies, transportation, ethical production models, the corporatization of food, packaging, and waste (to name a few) impact our every-day decisions. By no means do we do everything right. I do have a soft spot for Cheez-Its, which thankfully are not sold in New Zealand, because I honestly cannot resist their awesome deliciousness. But, we are organic veggie farmers and growing food is a big part of our life.
In our lovey-dovey first dating bliss, we had envisioned growing all of the food for our wedding, including raising any animals we might want for meat. That was before we started planning a wedding half-way around the world. I'm pretty sure they don't allow halves of cows in checked baggage, and I'm not carrying that sucker on, so growing our own food is a bit out of the question. As they say though, when one door shuts…
Having realized that our geographic predicament prohibits us from growing our own menu, we became committed to supporting local organic farmers in the area where we are getting married. Based on this decision, we chose to hold our wedding in August, a time when there is an abundance of local produce.
Even though August is a time of abundance, there are certain things that simply don't grow in the northeastern U.S., so our goal in designing the menu was to minimize or eliminate the use of these things, and swap them for more local options. Also, while we are not vegetarian, we eat a mostly vegetarian diet (meat about once a month), and are strictly opposed to factory farmed meat. We wanted the menu to reflect this. We also understand that while eating sprouts and hummus are part of our everyday diet, for some people this will be a very unique food experience, and we want our guests to enjoy the food too. So the goals became, local, mostly veggie, and super yummy. Luckily, Mike the cook, from Indian Head Camp, was more than willing to work with us to make our vision a reality.
We started with the standard menu that Indian Head uses for weekend events (That's right our wedding takes place over the course of an entire weekend. That's a lot of meals to plan out). Keep in mind that Indian Head is a camp, and their standard menu is for school, camp, and conference groups.
Here's what we began with:
That menu was really nice, but didn't reflect us. At all. So, we sent some suggestions, did some research into local and regional companies, and this is what we ended up with:
Thursday Night:
We all know that my home state has the best pizza ever in the whole wide world. Let's hope we can find a local pizza shop that can come close to matching the skills of their garden state counterparts, because we will have about 30 close friends and family that will be working their butts off all day to get everything set up. And they're gonna be hun-gry.
We've opted out of hot breakfasts all together. Hot coffee for Mr. Veggie, definitely, but with all the other food we're going to have, hot breakfast seemed like overkill. So we're going with yogurt, fruit, granola, and bagels with cream cheese. Breakfast is a meal that generally contains a lot of non-local products (think bananas, spices, cocoa, coffee, tea). We've chosen to say no to bananas, but yes to coffee and hot chocolate. Priorities.
Lunch Friday:
Sources: Top Left, Top Center, Top Right, Middle Left, Middle Right, Bottom Left, Bottom Center, Bottom RightWe've nixed the more traditional sandwich board, because of the many processed meat products, and gone with egg salad, tuna salad, and grilled cheese. We'll also have an amped up salad bar with all the traditional fare, plus sprouts and Annie's Organic dressings, and tomato soup. Who doesn't love grilled cheese and tomato soup?
Dinner Friday:
Chili Cookoff and microbrew taste-test. We're sending out a call for chili and microbrew competitors with our invites. Hopefully people will get into it and bring a batch of chili with them. If not, looks like we'll be eating a lot of corn bread and corn on the cob.
Lunch Saturday:
Taco Bar. We will make use of the leftover chili from Friday night (if there is any!) and have a taco bar. Easy. Delicious. Fun for all ages.
All those food pictures are making me hungry. Time to go cook some dinner. In my next post I'll walk you through the rest of the weekend's food choices and talk a bit about the rationale behind the choices. I'll also talk about about the food-miles associated with our choices and how all of this has affected our budget.
What do you think so far? Were there certain must-haves on your menu? Would you mind eating vegetarian for a weekend?
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