A friend of mine just got engaged and she is on an extremely limited budget. She is placing the wedding around december, so we’ve got a few months to plan.
All of us are quite good cooks - but we are sick of the same old recipes that we make time and time again. She wants the wedding to be elegant, simple and understated.
So, your challenge if you choose to accept it is to suggest fingerfood recipes for a wedding that fall under the following categories:-
easy to eat
elegant
can be prepared ahead of time (and heated up if required)
can get the ingredients fairly easily
It’s summer in australia in december, and the venue is at an old surf club on the beach.
Have your friend go to that www.food site and put in finger foods. There are some easy recipe’s there. Not sure if this helps, I’m a little sleepy right now.
I LOVE these Dainty Pea Salad Cups basically, you make a shell by baking a wonton wrapper inside a muffin tin so it crisps up. I did mine three days ahead of time and then stored them in airtight containers. The salad dressing can be made up to a week or so ahead of time (it’s basically a buttermilk dill dressing). The celery can be chopped whenever, and the cheese preshredded. Since it’s going to be during the summertime, I’d keep the peas frozen until the last minute, so they act as their own chill device. The only thing that can’t be done ahead is actually scooping the pea salad into the cups - they will get soggy eventually. I found I could work very quickly using a 2 ounce scoop disher.
I also used the same wonton cups and made my chicken waldorf salad, only with the pieces cut up a bit smaller than normal so they were finger-food friendly.
These Oven “fried” Chimichangas are great and can be varied as to filling and wrapper. They’re healthier and faster to bake than to deep fry if you have an oven on site. They can be made ahead and frozen on cookie sheets, then baked before serving (your baking time will be much shorter with a rolled taquito shape, so experiment ahead of time. Yes, they really do get brown and crispy without deep frying! They even taste good at room temperature, but I don’t know what your local health regulations are around such things.
They are awesome suggestions, thank you very much. can anyone tell me how many dishes we would need to cater for for around 60 people?
I love things in little edible cups.
I was also thinking vietnamese rice paper rolls (cucumber, prawn, cellophane noodles) served with a satay sauce, but these are a bit fiddly to make on the day.
Fancy potato chips. I’ve seen Julia Childs do it and also have seen it in a cookbook devoted to such delights (not in my own library, alas).
The basic gist is to get large russets, peel them, shape them, then slice very very thinly on a mandoline. Press a few herb leaves between two slices sealed together with a little water and fry very lightly, then drained and kept in a warm oven. They look very elegant, but I don’t have much more to go on than that. Maybe some experimentation is in order. (I’m googling my butt off though trying to find them!)
My daugher- and son-in-law served melon slices wrapped in prosciutto at their wedding. It was very elegant and went well with the wine they also served. Easy to make, too. They put it all together themselves before hand, and they had a reception of about 50-60 people.
Honestly, if you’re on a budget - you should work it out in reverse. Figure out how much you want to spend per person - multiply that times 60 and then stretch that amount to as much finger food as you can. The only way to have too much food is to spend more than you can afford. Otherwise - if you have leftovers, who cares?
I just got home from one of the nicest wedding receptions I’ve ever attended. The food was DIVINE and I think I blew a weeks worth of calories on the buffet. Here is a recipe to my favorite thing that was served Marinated Crab Claws . Yummmmmy
Giada de Laurentis did an episode of her TV show on the theme of a simple, elegant wedding that had some great, easy ideas. I’ll try to find a link for you later. I do remember some white chocolate hazelnut tarts, and some cone-shaped things filled with crab salad. And the wedding cake was so simple, and sized to fit the number of people you’re planning for (same number I’m planning for for my daughter’s wedding, whenever that’s going to be…
Actually I would recommend looking through Giada’s site at Food Network because she makes dozens of small dishes like this. The only caveat is that they might total out as being too expensive. Here’s her site. I’m not sure that the Italian theme will go so well with the old surf club theme though.
I was wrong! the show was Sandra Lee… here’s the cake and the lobster wrap they mention at the end is what I was thinking about. The white chocolate-hazelnut tarts were from Giada, though…off to find the link…
Something to think about when you are planning the food for the reception is what time of day the reception will be. If it is around meal time, you need to have more food, and more substantial food. If it is “just” a cocktail hour, you can get away with less food.
It’s kind of chintzy to only serve finger food at dinnertime! You’ll need substantial stuff. You can wrap pretty much up anything in phyllo; you could do curried chicken or some sort of spiced chicken and mini-spanakopitas. I’d definitely do the mini-quiches and maybe something else rich and cheesy. You can have some light fluffy things but overall, you’ll need to actually feed them.
Any chance she’d change her mind and agree to a buffet? You could still prepare the dishes for it in advance, especially if you went for a cold buffet with maybe a few hot hors d’oeuvres.
I went to a wedding last summer that was held right by the beach at around 4pm. It was near the beach in the most beautiful place to get married. Everything was top of the line, an amazing string quartet, the works. Every time I see anyone else who went to that wedding, you know what we say?
“Remember how starving we were at that wedding? I mean seriously, who has like three tiny hors d’oeuvres coming around at dinnertime?!”
We blew off the reception and went to a pizza place. Don’t let that happen to your friend. Make sure there’s enough booze too, if your friends are into that sort of thing.
