Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Confirmation Reception


This weekend, I catered my second event, a reception for the confirmands after the confirmation service at our church, Raleigh Moravian. Since it was a pre-lunch soiree, we didn’t have a large menu, but since it was for a big group, we had to have a lot of it.
We dropped the girls off in nursery, and got to work. Casey was there, and offered to help out. I think part of the reason was because BK was having some separation anxiety, but he said also that there was no room in the sanctuary! A few minutes later, Barry came in and asked the guys to help him add some folding chairs because they actually had to turn people away! I may have gotten in over my head…
As I was getting everything prepared this past week, Nick was looking at the food and saying stuff like “four trays of sandwiches?? Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” or “eight dozen cupcakes??! Really?” (It ended up being 6 ½ dozen anyways…) but when everyone came in the food was gone in a flash it seemed! I literally came home with two boxes of crackers and a box of cheddar bunnies (kind of like goldfish). I did throw away maybe four of the cheese straws that I made… sorry, I was just kind of tired of looking at them J
Here’s the menu and some pics:



Italian Artichoke Dip
Turkey & Cheese Sandwiches
Cupcakes with cream cheese frosting
Lemon-filled sugar cookies
Key lime pie Meringues
Sparkling Lemonade- (Casey helped...he's an engineer :)


Things I learned this time around:
  • Last time, I didn’t have a “schedule” of when I was making my food, so this time I did that, making sure to make things that utilized different equipment every day, so I wasn’t trying to use the oven ALL DAY.
  • I realized there are some things that HAVE to be done on the day of, like icing with cream cheese frosting (don’t know that I’ll use that again!!).
  • Maybe Linzer cookies are small for a reason
  • I need to have a supply box of things that some places may not have; paper towels, trash bags, Clorox wipes, and chip clips are definitely on that list!
  • Even though I now am making a schedule, I should probably run it by my husband, because he thinks more logically. For instance “maybe you should have made the lemonade a little later in the week, so that our whole fridge isn’t full for the next five days!” I’m just trying to get stuff made, and in a short time, but he’s right, I had very little to do yesterday, and could have made it then!
  • EVERYONE comes to confirmation!! We had at least 300 people in the church, and we actually ran out of food! That’s one thing that’s difficult about planning an event when you don’t know how many people will be there… since it’s getting to be summer time, sometimes we only have about 100 people at church, I knew there would be family and friends coming in, but that’s just crazy!! I think Nick sees now that I know some of what I’m doing at least!

That’s all the events I have for now, but many a business card has been handed out or picked up, so I’ll let you all know when something else comes up! Thanks for reading!!

Friday, May 18, 2012

My First Paying Gig!


So, I completed my first “real” catering job this past week. It was a lunch for the maintenance staff and parents who help out at sporting events at an area private school. It started out being for about thirty people, then 37 to 40, and ended up having all of those, a few coaches, the athletic director, and the school president! I am so forgetful that I forgot my business cards, but thankfully, I know myself, and had a few in my purse as well! 

My sister came down to help out with the girls while we got ready for this event and during our yard sale the weekend before. It was great because I realized that having a couple of extra hands would really help me out at the school as well. If she hadn’t been here, I may have gone crazy!

Here are some pics of the food that we prepared for the event, and here’s the menu:


 Fruit salad
Italian meatball sliders
Garden salad with four dressings
Baked potato bar
 Baked Beans
Spicy Chicken Avocado Roll-ups
Broccoli salad
Sports themed cupcakes
Ginger Watermelon spritzer
Strawberry Lemonade

The cupcakes I may have gone a little overboard on, I had chocolate cupcakes with chocolate icing, chocolate with chocolate filling, made to look like footballs, chocolate with strawberry filling, made to look like basketballs, vanilla cupcakes with chocolate filling, iced to look like soccer balls, vanilla cupcakes with strawberry filling, iced to look like baseballs, and vanilla cupcakes with lemon curd, iced to look like tennis balls. There were supposed to be vanilla/vanilla cupcakes too, but I ran out of plain vanilla butter cream icing at the zero hour! I guess it was OK though, because they were the hit of the show and very few made it home with me!!

I was a little upset that there was no Sweet and spicy bacon wrapped chicken to take home with me, but I guess that’s really a good thing! Also, the Spicy Chicken Avocado Roll-ups were very popular and many people asked me for the recipe. I’m going to try to see if I can link them up, and if not, the recipes are on my Pintrest board!! 

I’m catering the Confirmation Reception at church this weekend, so hopefully I’ll get better pics and another blog post very soon!!