Cooking for Your Own Wedding Without Losing Your Mind

by L.V. Anderson

Dear Hairpin,

I do not know who to ask. I don’t think this is necessarily a question for A Dude, A Lady, A Spider, or A Clean Person, but is there perhaps A Liberated Domestic God/Goddess on your staff?

I recently finished grad school, so my partner and I are having a civil ceremony next weekend because my health insurance is over. (I don’t believe in marriage unless it’s for an actual reason because I don’t need a state-sponsored piece of paper to validate my relationship, rant rant rant.) There will be 35–40 people coming. Many are omnivores, some pescatarians, some kosher, some vegan, and there are some severe tree nut allergies as well. Nearly all are foodies. I am cooking. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ on rollerskates, WTF do I make? They have to be things that can be made in quantity and reheated, because I ain’t doing no crazy presentation bullshit. If it looks like poop in a bowl, I don’t care as long as it tastes good.

I’m very good in the kitchen, but this combination of dietary guidelines and my brain being in a puddle after graduate school hell is making me moan, slump, and pour, if I may reference the earlier Hairpin article on how to make a wedding cake. Any help would be extraordinarily appreciated. Oh, also, I live in an apartment and I’m broke — a side effect of grad school — so BBQing or going out aren’t options. Thank you in advance.

— Moaning, Slumping, and Pouring. Lots of Pouring.

First of all: Congratulations on finishing grad school, your impending marriage to the person you love, and your rejection of the notion that a wedding must be a grotesquely overgrown vestigial organ of the patriarchy. Managing expectations is half the battle of cooking for people, and your expectations for your wedding already seem eminently healthy and realistic, so good for you!

Second of all: Oh my god this sounds like a total nightmare. Cooking a meal for 35 to 40 people immediately prior to and after your own wedding? I mean, yes, I get that weddings are stressful, but the tethering-your-life-to-another-human-being’s part and the putting-all-your-crazy-relatives-in-a-room-with-all-your-crazy-friends part strike me as PLENTY stressful already without a slaving-away-in-the kitchen part.

My main piece of advice is to delegate, delegate, delegate. A wedding is a declaration of your love and commitment that you and your partner are making to your community, is it not, so shouldn’t your community be more than nominally involved? You have family members and close friends who love you and want to make sure your wedding is a success, yes? Now is the time to put guilt trips on them. But you’re not asking that much, really: Ask your brother to make salad. (Easy: put olive oil and vinegar at the bottom of a couple of large salad bowls, add mesclun/baby spinach/arugula/any other greens that don’t require any prep beyond rinsing, throw in some of your favorite chopped vegetables and/or fruit, let it sit, and toss it just before serving.) Ask your college roommate to roast some vegetables. (Toss them with just enough olive oil to coat them lightly, spread them in a single layer on a baking sheet, cook them at 425°F until they’re tender and browned. Done.) Send your mom a sheet-cake recipe and ask if she can double it for you. (Two 13- by 9-inch pans’ worth of cake ought to be enough for 40 people.)

Be clear about what you want — in my experience, people respond much better to specific instructions than to vague ones, especially if those people don’t consider themselves to be cooks. So don’t just say, “Oh, can you bring a side dish?” Say, “Can you please trim and roast twenty pounds of asparagus for me?” (Oh my God, that’s like the weight of a cocker spaniel, but I think that’s right — half a pound of vegetables per serving is a good rule of thumb — and though you could probably get away with smaller servings, I have a deep-seated fear of NOT HAVING ENOUGH FOOD, so if it were me, I would err on the side of overshooting. Leftovers are not the end of the world. Actually, they’re great!)

I’ll let you work out the financial details of the delegation on your own; your Loved Ones might be more than happy to eat the cost of ingredients, but even if you have to pay for the food they cook, the stress and time they’re saving you more than make up for it. And remember: They love you. They’re coming to your wedding because they want to support you, and they want to help. (And if they don’t, disinvite them and never speak to them again!)

So this leaves only the main dish for you and your partner to make. This is where those dietary restrictions start to seem a little challenging. The good news is, at least you don’t have anyone with celiac disease coming to your wedding, amirite? [Laughs hysterically for several minutes.] But seriously, I would say that the combination of Special Dietary Needs on your guest list is actually not that bad, if only because the vegans pretty much already exclude everything that the pescatarians and kosher Jews avoid. (I’m assuming that your kosher guests aren’t strict about their food being prepared in a kosher kitchen, because if they are, there is simply no way for them to eat anything you make, so you’re totally fucked. But let’s think positive!) So really all you have to pull off is a vegan meal that’s free of tree nuts for 40 people, and while this is certainly challenging, I would say that it’s only marginally more challenging than pulling off a non-vegan, tree-nut-full meal for 40 people. And, on the bright side, you have to worry less about things like food poisoning, which are more of a risk when you’re cooking meat than when you’re cooking things that aren’t meat.

I’m going to take you at your word that you don’t care how the food looks (which is good, because I think it’s impossible to make industrial-scale dishes look pretty or elegant or anything except disquietingly enormous), and I’m going to recommend one of two paths: chili or baked ziti.

I’m afraid you might think these options are boring, old-fashioned, even unsophisticated. You know what? Maybe they are! But they’re also relatively easy to make in vast quantities, virtually impossible to fuck up, and more or less universally liked. You could do worse, in my opinion.

My favorite vegan chili recipe is from Jack Bishop’s A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen, and, amazingly, you can view it on Google books. (I love you, Google books, even though I also hate you for what is almost certainly copyright infringement. Buy books, everyone!) If you decide to go with this recipe, you’ll probably want to multiply all the quantities by eight; use the biggest pot you can find, and work in two batches (quadrupling the original recipe for each batch). I think this recipe is particularly awesome because of the canned chipotle chile, which makes it smoky; the tempeh, which makes it wonderfully thick and rich-tasting in a way most vegetarian chilis aren’t; and the beer, which makes it, well, taste gently like beer, in the best possible way.

If you’re scared by the idea of using tempeh, just substitute more beans (two 8-ounce packages of tempeh roughly equal one 15-ounce can of beans). And if you don’t want your chili to taste like beer, WHY NOT? But you can use water or vegetable stock instead. You can also vary this recipe (which is a pretty good basic template for chili) by using a different kind of bean (pinto, cannellini, chickpeas, whatever) or adding vegetables (sauté them with the onions at the beginning). No matter how you vary it, you can make it up to a few days in advance, pack it into a jillion Tupperwares, refrigerate it, and then reheat it the day of; it will not suffer in the slightest for having sat in the fridge.

Option number two: baked ziti. (Which doesn’t have to be made with ziti, for what it’s worth — any cut pasta, like penne, farfalle, rigatoni, or orechiette will do — but ziti seems to be the Kleenex of baked pastas.) This will require dirtying a few more dishes than the chili, but again, you can assemble it a day or two in advance and bake it the day of, and it will still taste fine.

I couldn’t find any decent-looking vegan baked ziti recipes online, so I’m just going to tell you what I’d do based on the baked ziti I usually make. Start by making a huge batch of tomato sauce, which is easier than many people think: First, chop 4 to 6 onions, a couple of heads’ worth of garlic, a couple of carrots, and a couple of celery stalks. (If you want to make tomato-mushroom sauce, which I recommend unless you hate mushrooms, slice 4 to 6 pounds of mushrooms, too.) Sauté these all together in about a cup of extra-virgin olive oil in a gigantic pot. When the vegetables are soft, add 6 or 7 large (28- or 35-ounce) cans diced tomatoes, bring the mixture to a boil, reduce the heat to medium-low, and simmer until it’s thickened some, about 10 or 15 minutes. Stir in a bunch of chopped fresh basil or a handful of chopped fresh rosemary (or both!).

Meanwhile, cook 6 or 7 pounds of pasta in salted boiling water. (You will probably have to work in batches.) Cook it for only half the time recommended on the package; it should still be pretty hard in the middle. Toss the pasta with the sauce (again, probably working in batches), some of the pasta-cooking water if you need it to bring everything together, and other stuff, if you want: I’d recommend 4 to 6 cups of good oil-packed black olives (buy the kind that are already pitted to save yourself the drama) and/or 4 to 6 cans of chickpeas or cannellini beans (drain and rinse them first).

Now, grease gigantic foil roasting pans with olive oil and pack the pasta into them. (I don’t know how many pans you’ll need; you might want to buy three or four just to be safe.) Cover and refrigerate them until you’re ready to cook them.

The day of the wedding, if you have the energy, toss a few cups of bread crumbs (fresh, if your grocery store sells them; check to make sure they’re vegan) with more olive oil and chopped basil and rosemary, and sprinkle this mixture on top of the pasta. (It’ll distract everyone from the fact that there’s no cheese on it.) Bake the casseroles at 375°F until they’re hot in the middle (stick a fork into one of them to find out); this might take 45 minutes to over an hour, depending on the size of the pans. Check them every now and then; if they look like they’re getting too brown on top, cover them with foil as they bake.

You don’t mention whether you’re vegan or vegetarian — I’m assuming you’re neither — and I don’t know whether it’s important to you to have any meat or cheese at your wedding reception. If it is, you can certainly substitute ground beef for the tempeh in one batch of chili or put some sliced fresh mozzarella on top of one of the pasta casseroles right before baking. But do this only if you want to and not because you think you have to please your meat-eating guests. You’re under no obligation to serve meat or cheese at your wedding reception just because it’s what some people might expect, and anyone who says otherwise is full of shit.

As for making your food taste good: Well, if you’re good in the kitchen, I bet you know how to do this already. Use plenty of salt and pepper, which make everything taste good. (I never understand why people complain about recipes being bland, because whose fault is it if they’re bland, the recipe writer or the home cook who didn’t add enough salt?) And taste as you go so that you don’t find out at the last minute that there’s not enough basil/cumin/garlic/whatever(/SALT).

Oh, and don’t underestimate the power of bread to round out a meal and make people happy: Go to a great local bakery, pick up several baguettes or focaccia (almost always vegan, and almost never expensive), don’t look back.

And about dessert: As I mentioned before, I would recommend outsourcing this to a Loved One. And I hope this doesn’t sound inconsiderate to vegans (I love you, vegans!), but I wouldn’t worry too much if your dessert is non-vegan. I don’t mean to imply that vegan baking is difficult — it’s not, I mean, look at this fucking recipe, for instance — but you might just want to stick to a tried-and-true recipe instead. Vegans are already pretty used to not being able to eat dessert at non-vegan gatherings, but it might be nice for you maybe to provide some nice fresh berries or dried figs or dates for them so that they’ll have a little something sweet to snack on.

Overall, just remember that you’re not a short-order cook; it’s not your job to accommodate people’s every minor preference or to astonish them with your culinary finesse. I don’t care if your friends and family are “foodies”; this is neither the time nor the place for food snobbery. Anyone who finds fault with homemade food offered at a wedding clearly isn’t drinking enough and also has some other problems.

Good luck! Let us know how it goes! And, again, MAZEL!

L. V. Anderson lives in Brooklyn and writes recipes for a living.