Wedding & Honeymoon Culinary Recap
Tuesday, December 19, 2006 | posted by Mike
We had a comment down in one of the posts below asking about the food associated with the wedding and honeymoon. I guess that I should...after all, what are blogs for if not for going on about your personal life and subjecting all of your visitors to your stories? By all accounts, the food at the wedding was very, very good. We were lucky enough to find a reception site that doubles as a top notch restaurant, so we were pretty confident that the food would be good, although you never know if the quality will suffer due to the demands of such a large group. It turned out that there was nothing to worry about.
Everyone seemed to think that the food at the cocktail hour was the big hit of the evening. We had a carving station, a pasta station that featured tomato sauce with prosciutto (pictured, at right, with Mrs. TVFF.com and me) and garlic/olive oil with sausage and broccoli rabe, an Asian station (which had these great wantons on a spoon) as well as the usual cold spread, crudites and cheese. There may have actually been more food than that, but I never made it all the way around the room. And this wasn't even counting the passed hors d'oeuvres, which included shrimp and scallops with bacon and very tasty coconut shrimp. A number of people said that they barely had room for dinner after the cocktail hour.
But, yes, there was a sit-down dinner. We started with butternut squash soup, which was a little bit sweet but had a nice nutmeg undertone. A salad of greens with mozzarella and sun dried tomatoes was next. The main course was a choice of beef (prime rib...I think), chicken (with asiago cheese) and snapper (with a light tomato and olive sauce which Mrs. TVFF.com loved). I had the beef, and it came with a rich mushroom sauce that was made by someone who knows how to make a sauce. Finally, creme brulee and the wedding cake...white cake filled with chocolate mousse and raspberries.
The food was good, even if I do say so myself.
For our honeymoon, we went to Secrets Capri in Riviera Cancun, Mexico. It's an inclusive resort, and we had heard good things about the food. And, in all, it was good. Our three favorite restaurants on the property (of the five) were the pan-Asian, the Italian and the seafood, in that order. Now, they weren't the best Asian, Italian and seafood restaurants we had ever been to in our lives, but we were able to find good-to-very-good dishes at east. On both of our trips to the Asian restaurant, Mrs. TVFF.com ordered a whole big mess of sushi, while I went with two curries...shrimp in yellow and beef in green. Both lacked the heat of most authentic curries I have tried, but they possessed a nice, fresh herb flavor and the ingredients were impeccable.
Surprisingly, the one type of restaurant that they didn't have was a Mexican restaurant, although their breakfast and lunch buffets had Mexican dishes. The disappointment was reinforced when they had a fantastic Mexican buffet by the pool one night. It featured a huge spread of very good, authentic dishes. Perhaps the best parts were the beef tacos, which were roasted on a spit, carved and seared over coals with small corn tortillas and served with onions, cucumbers and radishes, and the tortilla soup, which had a rich broth with onions and peppers cooked soft, which added body to the soup when combined with the crispy fried tortillas added at the last minute. It would have been nice to have had these options every day.
Did I like the food from the wedding and honeymoon? Well, I gained a full five pounds in the week (including the rehearsal dinner at a very good Italian restaurant), so that should give you some indication.
