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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Stuffing Our Faces

Everyone says that doing your wedding tasting is the best part of planning the celebration.  And I have to say, they're totally right.

What you get to try depends on your wedding venue, I imagine, but at Clifton they let you pick four or six hors d'oeuvres to try out, two appetizers, two entrees, two desserts, and two flavors of wedding cake.  Then they let you try two red wines and two white wines to figure out what you want to serve.  The goal is to somehow pick between all of these to design your menu. 

We were unprepared for exactly how much food we were going to eat.  We thought there would be a bite of this and a pinch of that.  Oh no.  We ate full portions of just about everything.  And the food was freaking delicious.


Here are the hors d'oeuvres we tried.  Going clockwise, on the upper left there's a tempura pickle, then a chickpea pancake with aioli on top, then a proper Virginia ham biscuit, and then a crab salad sandwiched between two potato chips with ginger ketchup.  They were all awesome except the crab was just a little bit too big to eat neatly (but we can shrink it down).  I do worry we have too much fried stuff but it is summertime finger food, after all.


This is a chickpea pancake with goat cheese, smoked salmon, avocado salad, microgreens, and an olive-shallot dressing.  It was very good but a little complicated.

I forgot to take a picture of the appetizer we're probably going with, which was a duck prosciutto with cantaloupe and walnuts.  The chef initially served the duck as part of a salad, but we asked him to showcase it a bit more instead of burying it in arugula and he was completely flexible about it.  It was a real pleasure getting to know him and work with him.


Here are the two entrees, and they were both so unbelievably good I think we'll let guests choose between them.  In front you have halibut with grapefruit in a citrus butter sauce with parmesan risotto, and in the back you've got bison with oyster mushrooms and soy sauce with whipped potatoes.  

This is a Virginia apple crumb tartlet with red wine caramel sauce and caramel ice cream.  It was delicious (Virginia apples rock), but it was a little bit too heavy for summertime eating.  It would be perfect in October.

This is a lime-mascarpone mousse with a chilled berry soup.  We preferred this dessert because it was lighter and more refreshing after all the heavy food we just ate.  

These are the two cake flavors we tried--chocolate mint on the left and vanilla with passionfruit and strawberries on the left.  I fully expected to like the vanilla better but the prize had to go to the chocolate.  But as you can see, both are covered with a honking amount of buttercream.  I think we'll have the chocolate cake covered in ganache.  Nothing wrong with a brown wedding cake, right?

We decided to serve the dessert after dinner and then the cake as a pick-me-up after some dancing.

Good food is so important to me at a wedding.  It's an integral part of guests having a good time.  I loved the food we tasted and I know our guests will too.



1 Comments:

Blogger Admin said...

Ok, I'm so hungry now.
www.nwbride.blogspot.com

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 6:58:00 PM  

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