If you are planning an outdoor wedding for this summer, you might like some ideas on the food you might serve your guests.
Of course, one way to cut back on your food budget is to keep your guest list small.
It is only common sense that the less people you have to feed, the less money it will cost you.
However, there are ways that you can serve as many people as you would like yet spend far less than you might expect to.
I have attended several weddings lately and we have had two in our own family in the past year.
A big trend is to serve your food buffet style.
One of our daughters had an outdoor wedding on the banks of the Snake River.
We served a buffet that included four types of sliced meats, several kinds of sliced cheeses, several kinds of salads, chips and home-made salsa, veggie trays and fruit trays complete with a chocolate fountain to dip the fruit in.
We set everything out on platters along with several kinds of condiments.
We had sliced hard rolls and everyone made their own sandwiches the way they wanted them.
We had all the food together ahead of time and got a couple of my daughters friends to help set up the buffet and keep it going so I could enjoy the festivites.
I paid them generously for the day because they worked hard.
I couldn't have done it without them.
If your are going to do something like this, you will want to get some help.
We served about 150 people so it was a pretty big job.
We had tons of compliments on all of the food.
The secret was to have detailed plans of what we wanted to serve and get everything all together ahead of time, but it all worked out great.
We attended another wedding where the bride's aunts set up a buffet that included different types of appetizers.
There were several different types of meatballs, sausages in different sauces, deviled eggs, cubed cheese, fruit and veggie trays.
Let your imagination flow and come up with your own ideas.
There are thousands of appetizer ideas on the internet.
Pick out some easy ones and have a great buffet.
Pick things you can make ahead of time that you can heat up in the crock pot and serve it out of the crock pot.
As with the previous idea, help from friends and family is probably essential.
Another friend of mine served barbecue pork sandwiches at his sons wedding.
This took some work ahead of time, but it turned out totally awesome.
He started a couple of months ahead of time by buying pork roast on sale.
He slow cooked them in the crock pot, shredded them and froze the meat until it was close to the wedding date.
Then he made this wonderful home-made, to die for barbeque sauce to mix in with it all.
They served it on hard rolls and believe me, there was no one there that went away unsatisfied.