Catering Your Own Wedding Reception

Recently, a reader wrote: "Finally, someone who gets it! Catering your own wedding reception is possible and this site is proof of it! Thank you."

Catering your own wedding reception can save you a ton of money. In an age of $3 to $4 a gallon gasoline, and $5 for a gallon of milk, having an expensive wedding is out of the question for many unless you can get some help from family and friends.

You can do this. A wedding does not have to be professionally catered for it to be a big success. As long as you have good food and you are prepared, your wedding can be terrific if you cater it yourself. You just need some organization and help from some loved ones.

Gather your wedding party and close family members and brainstorm food ideas. Tell them what you would like and then listen while they tell you what they think they can do to help you.

Don't be demanding. If you know that your Aunt Sally makes wonderful Swedish meatballs, don't demand that she make some exotic and expensive roast beef dish. Let her make the Swedish meatballs. (By the way, I love Swedish meatballs and if you serve them at your wedding, please invite me!)

When I say "catering your own wedding reception", I mean you can get together with some family members and close friends, plan the menu, prepare the food, and assign some of the group to serve it.

The bride and groom and their parents will be far too busy during the reception to actually serve food. Instead of a sit-down dinner, you may want to serve the food buffet style, allowing your guests to go through a line and choose their own food. A few servers will need to keep replacing empty food dishes and put out fresh plates and utensils.

My grandmother and her sisters catered my mother's wedding in this way. My mother tells me it was wonderful and the food was fabulous. Not only did my grandmother cook some of her famous dishes for the wedding, but she also baked the wedding cake! Wow! Her talents sure did not rub off on me!

Plan the menu with your mom and some other relatives who love to cook. Keep it simple. Just make sure you will have plenty of food for the guests.

Ask close friends and family who are wonderful cooks if they will make their specialties. Most cooks have one or two dishes that they are famous for and love to make. This makes for a wonderful wedding potluck. You can serve a variety of delicious homemade foods this way and your guests will have a lot more choice. Crockpots are great for keeping food warm.

You can keep the drinks simple by offering coffee, iced tea, water, and punch or lemonade. Again, several people will have to be assigned to keep making and putting out new drinks, ice, and cups.

If you are having an outdoor picnic-style wedding, you can serve canned sodas and bottles of water in ice chests and hand each family a picnic basket of food. Or you can hand each guest his/her own small basket of food as each guest goes through the line. This is actually a very simple way of catering your own wedding reception. Everything is packed up ahead of time in baskets, or pretty cardboard boxes.

Yes, you can cater your own wedding reception, just like I did, and save thousands of dollars.

You will save a lot of money if you choose to cater your own wedding reception. Actually, enlist some close friends, family, and church members to help you with this. You will be too busy as the bride to actually do any wedding day catering.

If you choose soft drinks instead of alcohol, there is a good selection of non-alcoholic wedding drinks to choose from. The simplest and most obvious choices (not to mention the most inexpensive) are water, coffee, and iced tea. You may want to include soda, lemonade, or sparkling non-alcoholic juice if you have room in the budget for it.

If you choose to have a picnic-style or a backyard barbecue reception, chilled cans and bottles of water, soda, and tea will work out great for drinks. If your reception is more formal, of course, drinks will need to be served in pretty glassware.

For toasts, use non-alcoholic sparkling juice. It comes in a variety of flavors such as apple, white grape, and red grape. Good news--it is kid-friendly so the kids at your wedding can feel special and drink the same thing as mom and dad!

You can also use club soda or Perrier sparkling water. Perrier now comes in plain, lemon, or lime flavors.

When you pour sparkling juice into champagne glasses, it looks just like champagne. You can only get about five glasses out of one bottle so it is not cost effective if you are serving a lot of guests and you have a small budget. It is around $3 a bottle at Wal-Mart or Sam's. So use it for the toasting portion of your reception and then serve less expensive soft drinks, iced tea, and coffee for the rest of the time.

When you cater your own wedding reception, make sure that someone is assigned to keep the drinks fresh and full from punches to coffee and tea. Plain lemonade or Kool-Aid should also be on hand for children.

I have some delicious and simple wedding reception punch recipes on this page. They are easy to make and can be doubled if you have a large amount of guests.

Wedding punch is the old standby for wedding drinks when you cater your own wedding. You can purchase Hawaiian punch concentrate at the grocery store. Mix it with water in a punch bowl and add ice for the easiest punch. This is what I did for my wedding.

Cranberry Juice Punch

For a sparkling punch that is super-easy, mix a bottle of Sprite with an equal amount of cranberry juice or a cranberry mix flavor such as cran-cherry, cran-raspberry, cran-peach, and a lot of others. Combine them in a punch bowl with ice and voila! Yum. I always serve this at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

You can also buy the diet or sugar-free cranberry juice and diet Sprite to make a diabetic punch for those who have diabetes and for those who are weight-conscious.

Sherbet Makes It Better!

Make these wedding reception punch recipes even more delicious by adding sherbet to them.
A good idea for a pretty ice ring placed in the punch bowl is to freeze some juice of the same or a different color than your punch in a jello mold or in a Tupperware bowl. Chunks of pineapple, orange, or strawberries would look pretty frozen in the ice ring as well.

Pop the ring out of the mold or bowl and float it in the punch. It will keep your wedding drinks cold and flavor them at the same time instead of watering them down as the ice melts.

Sparkling Juice Punch

How Do We Keep Alcohol Out?

by Kari
(LaGrange, NY)

My fiance and I are Christians, but most of our family
are not. In a typical wedding there is drinking and dancing; we are a little worried that there might be a problem with our guests and family. We don't
drink, but most of our family members do. How can we solve this and prevent a problem...How do we keep alcohol out of our wedding?


--I solved this easily by having our reception in the church fellowship hall where drinking and dancing were not allowed in the Church of the Nazarene. Baptists have similar rules and I am sure there are other denominations with the same rules.
--Juanita