Final Preparations for the Wedding Meal

My son is now married as of May 18. I was so pleased with how the preparations went. I was making the food for the reception, so my sister flew in from Pennsylvania to help me with any last-minute preparations that needed to be done and although we were busy it went very smoothly.

We made pie crusts…

And pies…

Apple pies, peach pies, blueberry (actually the blueberry had already been made before she got there) and lemonade pies

Then my niece arrived and helped with various things including table displays for the rehearsal…

My friend Tina arrived at the same time as Grace.  Tina was in charge of all the chicken for the wedding as well as running the food part of the reception. She was awesome.  I never had to do anything in the kitchen the day of the wedding. (until we packed up…) 🙂

We peeled 150# of potatoes with the help of some other friends.  Surprisingly, that went very fast.

A friend of ours from 4-H let us use his commercial kitchen to cook the potatoes and his big mixer to mix them.  We put 30# of potatoes at one time into the bowl making short work of the job. But 150 pounds of potatoes still take time.  We were there 5 hours.

Lemons were squeezed – with Serenity doing the first part of the job and then being finished by my brother-in-law the morning after he arrived. haha

And then it was time to drive to the wedding location 1 1/2 hours from our place.  We arrived at the church, unloaded our food, skipped the rehearsal so that we could head for the rehearsal location where we got busy setting up for the dinner.

There were a few strange occurrences that day.  When we arrived at the church they had no idea we were having a rehearsal.  It wasn’t on the schedule apparently.  And then they showed us the kitchen.  After we were getting ready to unload everything they let us know that they were having food for 500 people arriving the next day and that they would need the refrigerator then.  But then, just a short while later, they told us we could have it and they would deal with the food some other way.  Thankfully.  I don’t know what I would have done with 23 pans of food!

Rehearsal dinner to come… 🙂