Sorry for the non-creative title. I’ve been invaded by some kind of flu bug and it has debilitated my brain a bit.

A few days ago I started talking about our desire to build a local/organic menu. Here are the meals that will round out our weekend.

Cocktail Hour Saturday:
Sources: Veggies and Dip, Cheese, Fresh Mozzarella and Tomato, Pita and Hummus, Fresh Fruit, Bruschetta

Of all the meals, the cocktail hour menu was the one that departed furthest from Indian Head’s initial suggestions. We moved from a microwaved/fried meaty hot menu towards a fresh cool light menu. Given the taco lunch and potential heat of august we thought this was a good call. We want people up and dancing, not down and digesting. It also helped bring down the cost of the menu and make it more local.

Sat Dinner
Sources: Baked Ziti with Spinach, Carved Meat, Yuengling, Roasted Summer Veg, Rice and Beans, Dinner Rolls, Mixed Greens, Roasted Winter Veg Unpictured: Green Beans Almondine (darn you flu-brain).

For Saturday’s dinner we wanted to provide one main meat dish and lots of vegetarian sides to choose from. We’re not sure whether to do beef or pork yet (have a preference? please let us know!), but in either case the meat will be free-range-grass-fed-organic and come to us from a local butcher. We haven’t made all of the alcohol decisions for the weekend, but definitely know that we will have Yuengling available with dinner (PA pride!).

Sunday Buffet:Sources: Scrambled Eggs, Beautiful Vermont Maple Syrup, Pancakes with berries, Homefries

We’ll finish off the weekend with Sunday brunch. By then, hopefully, everyone will be exhausted and stuffed.

Looking at our menu, and how full it is, its hard to imagine that we had to leave some things out. But just like how we had to make tough choices when coming up with our financial budget, we also had to make tough choices in our food-miles budget. Some of the big ticket items on our food mile list were: exotic fruits like bananas, mangos, and kiwi fruit; imported gourmet cheeses; coffee; tea; hot chocolate; asparagus; imported wine; rice; chickpeas for hummus; dried beans; and spices.

When possible, we switched these items for their local/ in-season counterparts. Melons and berries got swapped in for bananas and mangos, asparagus got traded in for green beans, gourmet cheeses were nixed for local varieties (like Cabot yummm…). We will try to stash a few bottles of NZ wine in our luggage, but other wines will come from Europe (which actually have a smaller eco-footprint than Californian wines for us East-Coasters).

There are some things that are important to us and will need to come from far away, no matter what. For these items, like coffee, hot chocolate, rice, beans, and spices, we will be sure to choose fair trade producers from as local as possible.

At some point I will do a calculation on the total food miles for our weekend wedding and convert that into carbon emissions produced, but since we don’t know the exact suppliers for most things, its a bit early for all that yet. Plus, honestly, I don’t think my flu brain would allow for it at the moment. But as far as I can tell about 90% of the food served will come from within the northeastern U.S. (Woo hoo!!).

Given the price of organic food (due to too many fair and unfair reasons to list here), it might seem like an organic local menu isn’t feasible on a shoe-string budget. But, we are paying the same price per head with our new menu, as we we would have with Indian Head’s original proposed menu. There are a few ways we made this possible:

1. Our menu is in-season. Almost all of our fresh fruit and veggies will come from local farms and markets. We have planned on cooking things that are generally in surplus in August in our region, which means lower prices.

2. Flexibility. Our cook is flexible. If a certain fresh item isn’t available in abundance in August, he is willing to switch to another local item, rather than importing the original item. This keeps costs low.

3. Hot breakfasts and hot hors d’oeuvres were substituted with cold items.

4. We planned our meals with creative ways to use leftovers in mind. Chili and salad bar from friday will become taco bar on Saturday.

5. We are forming a close relationship with our caterer and are offering to support him in researching local providers for specific items.

O.K., I’ve talked far too much about this for the moment (can you tell we love our jobs!). Would love to hear any suggestions for our menu, especially about the beef or pork toss-up.

Although Mr. Veggie and I don’t agree on everything (really?), we did have a very sure vision of what we wanted in regards to our wedding menu.

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:

Source

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.

Breakfasts:Sources: Top Left, Top Right, Bottom Right, Bottom Left

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 Right

We’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:

Sources: Top: Left, Right; Bottom

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?