words and photos: leafy greens !

(Photo: LMS)

Droooooool. <--- That's me dreaming about all of our wedding food. On a day to day basis, B and I enjoy a pretty simple diet. I am really into clean eating: unprocessed, natural, whole foods. A typical day of eating for me would be a bowl of oatmeal with almond milk and almond butter for breakfast, some berries dipped in almond butter and a veggie/tofu/hummus packed pita for lunch, and a pineapple/mango/papaya/rice milk/soy yogurt smoothie for dinner. I also snack on almonds and blueberries throughout the day. (I can totally munch through a pound of blueberries in a few hours!) Pretty boring, I know. That is why I am SUPER STOKED about eating at the reception! We have had two tastings with our caterer and they have both been perfect. We are still finishing up our menu but so far it is looking pretty spectacular!

Appetizers:
+Tomato pizettes with thyme and olive oil
+White bean puree on homemade sourdough with grilled treviso, cassis vinegar and extra virgin olive oil
+Grilled chanterelle and olive oil crostini

Buffet dinner dishes:
+Tofu lasagna
+Smashed fingerlings with roasted summer vegetables
+Nutmeg and walnut oil dressed grilled summer squash on grilled garlic bread with spicy roasted garlic puree and walnuts
+Fresh cannellini bean ragout with rosemary sage oil, sweet and sour parsley, and roasted garlic on baguette

(Smashed Fingerlings with Veg, Photo: LMS)

Family style on tables:
+Baby arugula salad
+A selection of homebaked breads and dipping oils
+Cumin picholine olives and almonds

(Photo: LMS)

We are trying hard to balance what we like (tons of fresh vegetables, tofu, beans and Mediterranean flavors) with what our guests would normally expect at a wedding (Tempeh chicken or tofu fish? Probably not the best foods to serve to a large group of hungry omnivores!). Our menu did start off with some other dishes, but we didn't want to scare off too many people, so we subbed some of them with the lasagna. Hopefully the lasagna will be a crowd-pleaser, and I swear you can't taste the tofu. Several of our options will be gluten free, and everything is 100% vegan.

Even though I am incredibly excited about the food, I am even more excited about this:

Our food choices affect the future of our individual and collective lives. Here are some things we are currently doing to walk our sustainable talk:

• we select organic and local produce from Los Angeles area certified farmers markets.
• we drive diesel vehicles fueled with B99.9% biodiesel fuel that we purchase at USA Gas Station on Glencoe and Maxella in Marina del Rey.
• we serve your food on washable china plates, cloth napkins, glasses and real silverware, even for picnics - unless you want disposables, in which case, we use Catergreen.com's compostable utensils and clamshell containers made from potatoes and sugar cane.
• we do not use water bottled in plastic, as many of the plastics you think you're recycling everyday unfortunately end up in a land fill. We use pitchers, and are in the process of transitioning to carbonating our own filtered sparkling water (we currently use sparkling water bottled in glass).
• we use a presoak and prescrub method to clean our dishes, avoiding leaving the water "running" during the manual portion of the dishwashing process.
• we are transitioning into being a zero-waste operation through the recent addition of our composting program (which makes amazing soil for Large Marge's organic home garden!).
• we are in the process of transitioning to solar web hosting for our website (go to www.catergreen.com for more information).
• we are transitioning to sourcing all of our ingredients within 400 miles of production, and most of our ingredients (about 70%) within 100 miles of production, in an effort to adhere to The 100 Mile Diet (more information at www.100milediet.org)

And, most importantly, all of this leads to the most flavorful, beautiful food you can get.

Text Source: Large Marge Sustainables

This was a huge selling point for us when booking our caterer. The other huge selling point? Meg always wrote back to us, and offered as many tastings as we needed to get the food right. When we first started planning the food we had a list of ten caterers to contact. Out of those ten, only four wrote back. We then did tastings with three companies, because the fourth charged $100 per person for a tasting! After sampling the food, Large Marge was the clear winner, and we booked the services right away.

Looking over our menu has made me seriously hungry. Are you having a traditional buffet or plated meal? Or are you going with a more unusual dietary choice?

words and photos: homestyle !

i am really, really struggling to make all the elements of this wedding come together.

we want it to feel like home. classy, fancy home. we want it to be the wedding we would have at our own home, if our own home could hold one hundred people (because if our home could hold 100 people, it would be here.)

that said, it is hard when i see a great wedding like this.
hands down the best bouquet i have ever seen.
grey and yellow? wonderful. palm springs pool party?! so fun.
i have weddinglust.

.....

last weekend i did some practice tablescapes and such. i also started a big project: hand making 115 mini chalkboard menus. i actually had to purchase a saw for this project! neat.

we won't be using these colors ( i just happen to only own orange napkins, and found super cheap perfect brown fabric at ikea). our caterer has tablecloths and napkins, but they are purple and brown striped. i want darkdark brown? and burlapy texture? i think...




so far, i think it looks too "glassy." i need more texture in there. but i can't let myself buy anything until i really decide on colors.

i must say i do love the way the chalkboards look (they will eventually be gocco printed with the menu, as soon as we have a final menu). each guest will have a personalized button as a place card.

our caterer uses stemless wine glasses and ball jars as water/tea glasses, so that will change the look a bit as well. there will also be several 7" hurricane vases with candles and full jars of rosemary on each table. along with pitchers of sangria. and bowl of olives. and nuts. and olive oil. and baskets of bread. what started off looking empty is beginning to sound very full.

seriously, blogger friends, how did you pick your colors? help!

project: catering !

food happens to be our wedding "hot topic." brodie and i have been vegan for over three years, and we were both veggies for many years before that. there was absolutely no question that our wedding would be a 100% vegan affair.

i have read SO MANY comments on this situation, how it is selfish to have only vegetarian food, how a vegan wouldn't want to be somewhere where only meat is served, that guests will go hungry and that the point of a wedding is to make our guests feel comfortable. all of these statements are (in my humble opinion) absolutely ridiculous. why should we throw away our values just because not everyone has the same diet? can our friends and family not handle eating a vegan meal once in a while? i really think if you serve ample amounts of good food, guests will be happy. you will be happy. there is no need to ditch your morals to please other people.

looking for a caterer to do a family style vegan meal in los angeles isn't a huge challenge. finding a caterer who makes great vegan food at a reasonable price (and is used to working in a show kitchen like at marvimon!) is. i originally e-mailed and called about twelve different companies. at least eight of those were off of our venue's preferred vendor list, and i had no idea if they could do vegan. about half responded that they could, but prices started at $100 per person, not including rentals, or taxes, or gratuity, and oh you want it family style? that's 20% extra.

we easily narrowed it down to three really promising catering businesses, and ended up doing tastings at two of the three.

tastings are slightly awkward. you have someone trying to impress you, watching you take every bite, asking questions while you are eating. my tips:

-don't go when you are starving. everything tastes good when you are that hungry!
-don't eat all of the food at once. take a few bites and take the rest home. try the food again when you aren't excited/nervous/being watched by the chef!
-don't be afraid to tell them you don't like something. have an opinion and speak up!

after our second (simply perfect) tasting, we really didn't want to do another. we knew as soon as we tasted the food and met Meg (the owner), that we would be going with Large Marge Sustainables.

we will be serving a semi-buffet (more on that later) mediterranean/italian meal. we are still working on the menu (more on this later, too) and will probably have a few more tastings until everything is just right.

in other wonderful news, our engagement pictures were posted today and i can't wait to share them!