The Biggest Party We've Ever Thrown
OK. We're back. We had a great time on our honeymoon, full of good food and wine. But we're still getting back to reality. Or getting used to our new, married reality. So updates will hopefully appear every couple of days for a while, but there may be occasional lags.
I figured the best topic for starting out was the menu for our wedding. You might imagine that two extreme food lovers would spend a lot of time thinking about the menu for the wedding, and you'd be right. But Melissa and I are also Slow Food members, and we wanted our food to reflect not only our taste in food but our politics about it.
Not that we beat people over the head with that, though some did half jokingly request a handbook explaining everything we did. Instead, we chose our caterer partly for the quality of their food (which we had had at other weddings and always noted for its tastiness) and partly for their willingness to let us choose specific local producers we wanted, organic produce, and so forth. And then when we printed up the menus, we listed the exact producers for the various ingredients, so people would know where their food came from.
We kept feeling they must hate us, detailing all the nitty-gritty stuff like that. My favorite snapshot: seeing the "bread" option on the buffet, Melissa wrote "what kind of butter do you use?". However, they claimed to love having customers who were so passionate about the food they would serve. They were also amused that while most couples go through a whole deliberation along the lines of "well we need to have this so that person has something to eat" or "aunt mamie doesn't like this, so we shouldn't have it in the main course" or, a phrase we heard often, "that's not very traditional", we said, "this is what we want, and hopefully everyone will be able to find something to eat".
And they came through with style. Lots of the guests made a point of coming over to see us just so they could tell us how good the food was. My uncle, who has eaten his share of good food, simply said "Wow." And it was stunningly presented, at least the appetizers (I'm going off our tasting menu: the day is, as everyone warns you it will be, a big blur). And yeah, of course it cost more, but we divvied up the costs a bit so no one took the full brunt.
So here is our menu, with my notes:
Seared Ahi tuna on English cucumber with wasabi mayonnaise featuring Pacific Farms fresh wasabi
Most wasabi paste you get in the store--and at most sushi restaurants, for that matter--doesn't have any real wasabi in it. It's just colored horseradish. I find fresh wasabi more subtle, with a more vegetal, nutty flavor. And a more refined heat. So we loved the idea of this appetizer, but swapped in the real stuff.
This was my favorite of the appetizers, a roll of sausage encased in a brioche. The sausage was flavored with "baking spices" like cinnamon and cardamom. This lent it a North African air which I enjoyed a lot.
A pretty standard appetizer, it was nonetheless well done. The Roquefort was produced by Le Papillon and was also featured on our cheese board, about which more later.
Leg of James Ranch lamb with mint pesto
Lamb and mint. It's a classic, and we went for it. So sue us. We told them early on that we wanted the lamb cooked very rare. When they brought it out for us at the tasting menu, our point person held back a bit. "You did say you wanted it very rare, right?" Indeed we did, deciding not to care if people thought it a bit undercooked. Blue Heron cooked it just to the minimal level they felt safe with. While delicious at the tasting, the pieces we got at the wedding had a fair amount of cartilage, so made for tough eating, but the meat was good. Even the person doing the carving commented on how good our lamb looked.
While we were only concerned with our own plates, Blue Heron made sure that there was a hearty vegetarian dish there so that the vegetarians in the crowd (which included our dear friends Hans and Mark) had something to eat. Quite good!
Asparagus and morel bread pudding
I want the recipe for the lamb sausage brioche. Everyone else at the wedding wants the recipe for this dish. Fortunately, I'll be the one asking the caterers if they'll part with them, so I get both. A savory bread pudding with wonderful asparagus and morels, the latter just beginning to be freshly available here in the Bay Area.
This is not our caterer's description of this dish, but our best man's term for the California cuisine staple of mesclun, goat cheese (Laura Chenel), sweetened pecans, raspberries, edible flowers and honey cidre vinaigrette.
I only got to try a little of this, but lots of people raved about the dipping sauce. Probably another recipe I'll try and pry out of them.
Vacherin Mont d'Or by Fromagerie de Doubs
Red Hawk by Cowgirl Creamery
Roquefort by Le Papillon
Ossau-Iraty by Fermier des Basco bearnais
We didn't just specify which cheeses we wanted on our cheese board, which is not uncommon, we cited specific providers that we wanted if they were available at the Cheese Board. Vacherin Mont d'Or, while at the tail end of its season, holds a special place in our hearts as it is our "engagement cheese": the cheese they served at The French Laundry when I proposed. Most of the recommendations for the best producers came from Cheese Primer, a book I wholeheartedly, nay zealously, encourage everyone to buy.
The cake was fantastic. Lusciously moist, it was unlike every other wedding cake I've ever eaten. With cake like this, I was okay with caving in to the traditionalists. We had a 3-layer cake, with one all-chocolate layer, one all-vanilla with strawberry preserves, and one with chocolate and vanilla layers.
Roero Arneis, Ca' Rossa 2000, Piemonte
Barbera d'Alba, Cascina Val de Prete 2000, Piemonte
Melissa and I went to a wine tasting event last May, and there was an opportunity to buy the wines at the importer's cost. As we tried to justify buying a--gasp!--half-case of this or that (ah, how times have changed), Melissa suddenly realized that we actually had a need for a lot of wine at a reasonable cost. So we got five cases of the Barbera d'Alba, 4 of the Roero Arneis.
It's a funny thing. Six months later, and we would no doubt have had a bunch of Germans for the whites, and who knows what for the reds. But we got what we got, and were happy with our choice. At our tasting, I thought the Arneis went better overall with the food, but they were both yummy.
One of our favorite Belgian ales, we were distraught to discover that their West Coast distributor went out of business and that right when we thought about buying some for our wedding, it was suddenly impossible to find. The Internet to the rescue! We found a Chicago-based website that stocked it, and two cases showed up a couple weeks later.
Long-time readers may remember our Champagne tasting from way back when (figuring out the URL is difficult with my current domain-name setup; just look in the Archives for February). We opted to go with this one, which we thought was interesting but not horribly expensive. The caterers poured freely, so we don't have a ton left (in fact, we only have 3 1/2 mixed cases now; our guests did a good job on the booze), but we have enough for a few special dinners.
Zocalo Coffeehouse Decaf House Blend
Assorted dark and herbal teas
So, it was quite the feast. It took a fair amount of planning on our parts, but the key to making it work was finding the right caterer. They did a lot of footwork on their own, and turned out some truly spectacular food.
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