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Cater Your Own Wedding
By Michael Flowers and Donna Bankfield
New Page Books, 2000; ISBN 154144747
This book should be titled "Your Friends are Catering Your Wedding---Good Luck!". It gives some very bad advice that will surely spell disaster.
Flowers and Bankfield give guidelines for six different types of weddings from Basic Bar-bee to Ultimate Gaga. The premise of the book is to round up between fifteen to twenty-nine friends, organize them into teams and give them tasks. If none of the teams mess up---presto, a wedding! No stress right? Hopefully the teams will refrigerate the food and no one will die of food poisoning. Hopefully they will get to the hall on time and put enough coffee in the urns. Making coffee for a hundred to two hundred people and having it taste good doesn't sound easy to me. Flowers and Bankfield assure readers: "It's only coffee, for Pete's sake!"
Other bad ideas :
Having your team members pick up the ice on the way to the hall.
Using live fish for center pieces so guests can have pets to bring home
Making strawberry trees by skewering lettuce leaves and strawberries on giant Styrofoam cones (no mention of how to stop the lettuce from wilting and the whole thing from looking like a kindergarten project gone very wrong).
The main flaw in the book is the fact that only your very best friends would be willing to join your work teams and they will miss the wedding if they are at the reception hall preparing the catering.
If after having read this book you are still bound and determined to cater your own wedding, simply because (as the authors point out) you could buy a car with the money it costs to hire a caterer, this book offers some great menu ideas and recipes for 100 to 200 guests. The recipes alone make it a book worth having, although there is not much choice for vegetarians. So enjoy the book, but be prepared to have a craving for citrus punch after reading.
(Reviewed Midsummer 2004)
Meri is recently handfasted. She and her husband catered their own civil ceremony and handfasting receptions with the help of family and friends.
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Book reviews © 2004. Permission to reprint, with full credit, must be
granted by the author. If you would like to reprint this review, please
email WynterGreene.
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