Food!

We're still waiting on RSVPs.....but hopefully people will get to us soon so we can invite more if we're able!!! Although that will also mean making more invitations which doesn't sound like fun :/

Anyway, I'm also waiting on emails from like five people right now about wedding-related things. Hair and makeup, photography, etc. So much just waiting for answers when planning a wedding! But we're getting there! We got the vests and ties for the guys. We got some burlap table runners from a friend of Kevin's who used them at their wedding! We are getting blue mason jars from a family member to use as centerpieces. I got the table cloths a while back. I need to order napkins still. We are going to do little plants for the favors (still need to order little flower pots). I think I found some shoes. We are working on rehearsal dinner plans. We booked manicures and pedicures (yay Sharing Spree and sites like that for good deals!). We have an amazing couple who has volunteered to help get the food ready on the day of and tons of amazing family members who are making delicious goodies for us to serve. Which brings us to the current issue.

I have been going back and forth for the past few weeks on whether to do the meat ourselves or buying the pulled pork from the food cart guy across the street from my work. He makes amazing smoked meats and offered to give me suuuuch a good deal (Go visit him! He's on SW 4th between Clay and Columbia downtown Portland. Get the pulled pork tray with Asian sauce over rice. YUM.). Any catering places I checked charge between $11 and $15 per pound for pulled pork. Well we are serving 200 people (about 1/2 pound per person is the normal serving amount), which would equal about 125 pounds of pork (figuring in some extra)! That's between $1300 and $1800 just for the meat! He was going to charge me a fraction of that, but still about $600-700 more than it would cost to do the meat ourselves....So. We're back to the plan of making it. Really, storage space is the biggest issue. All we have to do is stick it in a crock pot and let it cook. So it will take time and space more than anything, not much actual preparation work. And we can do it in batches, so I think it will be fine.

But then we come to other foods. We want to have pasta salad, potato salad, green salad and cole slaw along with the main dish. I know about 1/2 pound per person of meat is what we should prepare, and that is easy enough to figure out. But how much salad?! 1/2 cup per person is the normal serving size for salad. And one gallon has 16 cups, so one gallon of salad is about 32 servings. Again allowing for extra, we'd want about 8 gallons of salad. But we don't want 8 gallons of EACH salad. I've been trying to figure out how much of each salad we should have. And would 8 gallons really be enough total? We don't want to run out of food! 2 gallons of each salad doesn't quite seem right. What if one salad is way more popular than another? So what I'm thinking is that we will shoot for 3 gallons of each salad. Which would be 96 full-sized servings, but people take less when there are more salads to choose from. So. That's what we're shooting for. I'll post afterward how that worked out since apparently no one on the whole internet has information like that!

So now to arrange all the food-makers and helpers. And get serving platters and figure out how and where to store all the food. Wish me luck! And any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Some websites that have been helpful in giving ideas for quantities:
Ellen's Kitchen
Great Party Recipes