The best thing about getting married is that you’re allowed to be totally selfish when it comes to your food. You get to choose a totally bespoke menu to suit your own tastes and ideas and you can indulge in your favourite culinary delights.
For Simon and I, our favourite form of eating is to continually graze – to pick at food and be able to eat when we want to. We absolutely love festival food, where you can pick and choose what you fancy at any time. Only at festivals can you find the most exciting array of food from all over the world. Nearly every cuisine you can imagine is available and accessible at any time of the day or night. What could be more perfect?
Simon is Jacaranda’s Sous Chef and has been working in the events industry for well over 10 years, whilst I have been organising and running weddings for the past 5 years. Between us, we‘ve learnt that almost anything is possible when it comes to wedding cuisine, from fine dining tasting menus and simple three course meals, to barbecues, sharing platters, afternoon teas and picnics.
We therefore figured that if all of these forms of wedding breakfast have been tried and tested, what’s stopping us from having festival food at our wedding?
The first step was to decide what cuisine we wanted at our “Festival of Love”. We knew we couldn’t have too wide a selection as we would need to make sure that we had enough quantities of each dish not to run out before all our guests have chance to sample them. Having a large number of varied dishes would also make the costs rocket!
It was hard, but we managed to shortlist our favourite cuisines to just three: Japanese, Thai & Mexican. So, let’s have a drum roll please for our global menus…
Our wedding banquet has been designed so that guests can go up to the food stalls as and when they want. We wanted to incorporate the festival theme as much as possible and love the idea of our guests freely ordering food whenever they’re ready. As such, we’ve done away with traditional tables, seating plans & name places. Instead, we’ve ordered small occasional round tables, to be covered with vibrant coloured cloths. These tables will be scattered around the gardens with chairs, along with lots of picnic blankets, cushions and pouffes.
Designing the Food Stalls
We’ve had a lot of fun creating this element of our wedding! We want the food stalls to not only look authentic, but exciting, vibrant and full of character. So with our passion for DIY, we’ve been making large signs to hang from above the stalls and black boards to write the menus on. We’ve also been absolutely obsessed with collecting props from charity shops, car boot sales and eBay to transform a blank canvas of a tent into a food stall representative of the cuisine on offer.
We’ve chosen to theme our food stalls, but there are so many other really inventive ways of having a themed station. As a few suggestions, how about…
- An homemade lemonade stand for guests to help themselves to on a hot day. Start collecting jam jars as glasses and fill giant jars or drinks dispensers with your homemade lemonade. Make sure you’ve plenty of stripy straws on hand too!
- A Pick & Mix stand, which is brilliant for evening munchies. Ask friends and family if you can borrow glass vases, cake stands, biscuit or pasta jars. You can buy original striped sweetie bags, scoops and tongs with a quick search of the internet. Maybe get a friend to make some bunting for you and decorate the stand.
- Fresh oysters being shucked during your drinks reception! You could theme the stall with all things nautical or fishy: start collecting fishing nets, drift wood, shells and pebbles and display alongside some lobster pots and wooden fish crates. Serve the oysters on a bed of crushed ice with lemons and limes. Shallot vinegar, Tabasco and Worcestershire Sauce will make great condiments.
Get CREATIVE with your food, because anything is possible. The hardest thing is choosing food that YOU love and trying not to think too much about what your guests will like. Make sure you’re mindful of dietary requirements but this is the one occasion when you can create a banquet that is fit not just for a king, but for you!