Experience serving your own food and drink?

Friends of the family, a lot of times they just consider it their gift to you so it is convenient

I am wondering why having a wedding on your parent's property means you cannot hire caterers. Food safety is a huge issue. Food not properly cooked or maintained can cause your guests (and you) to be sick. I've read horror stories on here about people who have attended self catered weddings and hardly any stories in which the food even tasted good. And definitely don't ask family or friends help. They are there to celebrate with you not work for you.

Besides the obvious downfall of food poisoning.

Buying all the food/drinks, the amount of time it takes to make everything, then hiring someone to serve it, costs more than a caterer.

I'm assuming you would be using paper plates?

Renting tableware from a caterer is also a lot cheaper than buying it.

Just because you are having a smallish wedding, doesn't mean you shouldn't hire professionals to cook and serve your food.

Hire a caterer.

Forget the stress and possibility of making everyone you love sick.

You should never ever have your family working at your wedding - an event that they should be honored guests.

We hired a caterer for food and desert, but bought our own liquor and are having a friend who is a bartender to work the bar. It is saving us money to buy our own liquor but I would recommend finding someone with bartending experience.

Hire a caterer. Do NOT self cater.

Why, oh why, do people think self catering and "hiring" friends and relative is a good idea? It is not.

Hire a pro.

In the next twelve hours -- starting right around 8:00 AM -- traffic on this thread is going to jam. If you're like most other posters who are self-catering, you'll eventually hide the thread.

Do not self-cater. Whether you are hosting 45 or 105, self-catering is a terrible idea for a wedding. I wouldn't eat the mass prepped food made by anyone in a random home kitchen, and neither would the majority of the women on this forum. Why? Because you and your family are not certified food handlers, and that makes every difference. The ladies here may put it on their plates for appearance sake and play with it, but most of them would not eat it -- whether it was served by professionals or not (and it probably won't be, due to liability issues. You may get a few clueless chain restaurant servers wanting to earn a few bucks on the weekend who don't understand liability issues, but you'll be hard pressed to find a professional, licensed food handler to serve your home prepared food).

Hire a caterer and pay them to serve your food. I swear to you, you won't regret it. It is totally acceptable to serve professionally prepared apps, salads, and an inexpensive pasta dish.

People can relax, I'm aware of how food and food poisoning works. My parents own a beautiful property and both come from the culinary industry. I didn't say we weren't hiring a caterer BECAUSE we were having it on our property, we aren't because we like our food options, our set ups we have planned, and know how to save a lot of money rather than hiring a catering service. I was looking to get insight on other options. We have professional friends/coworkers who would be willing to do the job, I was looking for insight, not sarcasm. Thanks all! And I'm not "self-catering," I would never ask my guests to do the work, or expect myself or family to do it. Thanks tons

So, your have friends/coworkers who are willing to do the job, but you're not self-catering? I thought self-catering was using people not identified as caterers -- to save big bucks -- to prepare your wedding food. I guess the definition of self-catering has evolved since...yesterday (and that's sarcasm -- nothing else was). You're probably going to say they are caterers. Great. Let them serve their goodies. What do you want from us?

LOL, you know how food poisoning works? Me too. You're sweating, cramping, vomiting, and having explosive diarrhea -- all at the same time. You are literally cursing the last place at which you ate. You're using more expletives than makes sense. It's an ugly scene; so ugly that you actually believe a gun or an ambulance would be your best friends (in that order), but since you don't own a gun and the hospital would send you home with a script for an antiemetic while telling you to wait it out (and you don't want to have an accident on the gurney), you're lying prostrate on the bathroom floor -- thankful for the small, almost undetectable comfort provided by the cold tiles against your (temporarily prone) face. It still works that way, right (unless you have a compromised immune system and you end up dead)? Unless you have the proper certifications in your desk and inspection certificates posted on your front window, you have no business catering a wedding. It's not Thanksgiving with the family.

Your parents both came from the culinary industry, but you've decided you're going to count on your friends and co-workers to handle the food prep. Hey, if your parents' history is spot-on, why don't the two of them whip up a little food magic?

You do realize that another word for those friends/co-workers who are willing to do "the job" (your words, not mine) is "guests", right? Okay, so using your guests, or joyfully accepting their offers to sweat on the days leading up to your wedding (and probably the morning of) is how you're going to do this. It's fortunate for you that your "we like our food options...and know how to save a lot of money rather than hiring a catering service" logic is something your guest-vendors are cool with.

Zofran, Reglan, and OTC Immodium. That's all they can do for food poisoning (and the first two require that uncomfortable visit to the ER).

Of course, you're different. We should have known. Consider us relaxed.

Oy vey. You have three stars; you must have heard my cautionary tale. But here goes (those who have heard it can zone out and visit one of the multiple threads that are inevitably being crafted as we speak....you know the ones....firing bridesmaids, cash bars.....honey funds......)

First of all, do not listen to Xantthia. No one considers being unpaid labor a gift: even if they put on a happy face while they would rather be having a cocktail and sitting down. They will agree to help but when it comes to scraping plates and hauling trash, you're going to be on your own. Trust me.

Although it's February, so those lawn and leaf bags full of old food and dirty napkins won't smell so bad.

I was a caterer who created and owned an upscale, off premise catering business for 20 years. (And let me assure you, being an off premise caterer is far different that 'being in the culinary industry', which can mean anything from chopping celery to selling caviar. It is a completely different animal, and it's not everyone's strong suit. Even my husband hated it for about the first 10 years....)

More years ago than I care to admit, I decided to cater my own wedding (65 guests) using my own commissary kitchen, my pro staff (not, by the way, my friends), another professional grade kitchen at the venue and the same waitstaff I referred to my own clients. I was marrying my chef, a gifted guy who looked exactly like Mario Batalli only taller. I married him because I couldn't afford to hire him, lol (only partly kidding)

It was one of the most stressful, least fun days of my entire life unless you count my divorce (We owned that biz and stayed BFF until his death six years ago). We were working on this party alone for the entire week (our typical work load hovered around 40 parties a week) , everyone's expectations were over the top, and the local media thought it would be a blast to cover it. Of course, because I am so much smarter than anyone I know (sounds familiar, doesn't it....), I did all our tablescapes (moss directly on the linens with plantings and silk birds...the rental company was delighted.....), decorated the cake (in my wedding gown), and hired three of the best jazz musicians in the country to play (very bad idea; no one danced at all, and my father, also a musician, got into a fist fight with the pianist over his rendition of "Embraceable You". The bagpiper got drunk and danced with my grandma, my photographer was horrifying (thank god the newspaper sent a war photographer to cover my wedding; those were the only decent photos we had....) All of this crap was a direct result of my poor judgement and my inability to let go of the pencil.

The food was amazing, no one died, no one starved and none of my actual friends or family worked on the day, except for me and my husband, and really, who cares if you work on your wedding day.....we left the venue without having eaten a thing except for four sesame chicken skewers one of my waiters left of the seat of the getaway car. (A lettered company jeep. very glam). We went to the hotel bar to have a drink afterwards; there were four other bridal parties in the bar; we went back to the room with a pitstop at the ice machine, drank a bottle of leftover champagne and passed out.

And it cost us a fucking fortune in lost business, spending money on everything from knotted bamboo skewers to a mashed potato bar that no one got (we were cutting edge, this was the late 80's, what can I tell ya....), and just that notion that 'hey, we're pros! We got this!"

Sounds like a dream day, doesn't it?

You're not going to save money because a week out, all of your carefully laid plans will start to derail and you'll throw any amount of money at the problems because you'll be so freaking worn out from the whole process that you won't care. Being a pro at your own party is nothing like being a pro at someone else's. This is why friendors, in even the most tangental way, are a generally bad idea.

Call a caterer, use their staff, not random servers from Craigslist who you will still have to direct because they're like a pick up band with the ability to kill people.

And then you can come back and thank us.

Wow, Celia...you've talked about your wedding before, but never in that much detail. It's sounds so...sad (at least for the two of you).

OP, if that story doesn't convince you to at least consider what is excellent advice, then nothing else will.

Centerpiece? None of it really mattered because the guy was the thing (a man who left four times to buy more pantyhose for me, lol....). But I would never create that shit show again, lol....