Huston, we have a caterer!

We have a caterer… which is weird, considering I just got my first real act of wedding planning done. EEK!

One of the things Marianne and I are trying to do is source things locally as much as possible, support non-profits when feasible and be good to the environment.

The caterer, Triad Community Kitchen wins on two of the three accounts.

Technically they’re a division of the Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina, but they’re such a neat little program. They offer folks who are unemployed, underemployed or homeless a 10-week training course to prepare them for careers in the food service industry. The program also works with them to actually find employment after graduation. According to the TCC website,

Chef Jeff Bacon, Director and executive Chef for the program, and certified guest chefs provide the classroom and kitchen training in the Second Harvest Food Bank warehouse. Each…training session includes certification in Serv-Safe sanitation, basic culinary skills, knife skills, kitchen safety, mass food production, and ‘cook chill’ technology training. Training includes instruction and activities designed to help ensure students are ‘workplace ready’ and a one-week internship with a local food service organization or restaurant to help students gain ‘real world’ job experience. Graduates may obtain further training, professional development and scholarship assistance with transferable credits applied to continued study at Guilford Technical Community College’s Culinary program and Forsyth Technical Community College’s Culinary program.

And our catering coordinator Tina is being so gracious in working with us. Considering I have asked her to reconfigure the whole menu twice, make it entirely vegetarian and politely declined any wait staff (saving us $500 in the process).

It’s me…you know there’s a backstory here:

Originally I had wanted a whole buffet dinner with an evening reception. beer, wine, fine china, the works. I was picturing a princess reception in a cabin in the woods, lots of dancing, a perfect wedding cake…everything was going to be magical. So I asked Tina to create a menu for us. And she did.

And the estimate was upwards of $2,000 not including the beer and wine and wait staff.

When Marianne reminded me that we don’t have $27,000 to drop on this wedding (which, apparently is the average these days! WTF are you kidding me!), my perfect princess wedding dreams had to shift a bit. Luckily, as I start breaking out in a cold sweat and hives all at once because I don’t know what we’re going to do, Marianne (in true Marianne fashion) just looks at me like I’m crazy and gives me a new plan.

A plan, it turns out, that’s pretty darn good.

She suggests we have the reception at the church directly after the wedding, around 2:30 p.m. or so, and only include heavy hors d’oeuvres… and cake. So we will.

Our new reception price for food and cake is $1,100. My dad kicked in some money to help, so our out-of-pocket expense is even less.

*SIGH* I can handle this. Marianne may take most of the credit for keeping me sane, but I can handle this.