By The Beach Festival: Eat Me, Drink Me (omnomnomables)

Food was always going to be a big part of our Wedding day, we both have families who have generations worth of celebration recipes and we ourselves make a big deal of fresh produce and seasonal food. The same goes for drinks, so we decided on bottles of chilled Corona with lime wedges for our welcome drink at the reception - they always remind me of hanging out with my sister, or uni summer BBQ's with my best mate Dave... I think taste really has a way of bringing happy memories right back to you in an instant, and so much of our menu was designed around amazing memories that are special to us.

Our Welcome drink was Corona with a slice of lime served from tin buckets full of ice! It was lush in the sunshine with a cold beer!

We had Victorian cloudy lemonade and ginger beer for non-alcoholic drinks, and a tin bath full of fruit shoots for the kids

Food glorious foooooood! One thing we were sure of: no 3 course fancy dinners for us. It would be profoundly weird to me to sit in a tent in a field wearing sneakers and listening to Richard Cheese cover Snoop Dogg songs - and eat consomme, or wild this that or the others with veloute and other french frumpery. Don't get me wrong, I love a madly perfect dinner when I'm out somewhere posh but it just wasn't going to fit with what we were planning. 

Dinnertime

Instead we enlisted the services of a family friend from the local area (in fact from a farm about ten minutes from Runswick Bay) called Sally. She, her husband and daughter run a catering business from their home, and bake/roast whole pigs in these huge ovens they have. I don't eat hog roast/pork as such so we settled on Hog roast for everyone else and a bit of roast beef for Trigger (Best Man) and I - as he doesn't eat pork either. Usually with a hog roast, you get the whole traditional bun/apple sauce thing going on, which is lovely, but we wanted to mix things up. We asked Sally if she could go mexican with it and what we ended up with was *stunning*. We had...

Spicy nibbles on arrival (wasabi peas, bombay mix, a selection of crispy things)

Trigger and Beki enjoying some nibbles from Ann!

For mains...
 
Hog/beef shredded on giant trays
Homemade salsa
Guacamole and sour cream
Spicy bean salad
Leaf salads
Mexican slaw (shredded veg)
Cheese
Tortilla wraps
Roast pepper salad and hoummus for vegetarians
New potatoes

We put Frank's hot sauce and bowls of Jalapenos on each table too, so that people could spice it up if they wanted to, and so that nothing on the menu was spicy for those who didn't like it. I guess the main thing to note here is that it was a pretty veggie-heavy menu, fresh and vibrant. Coriander and lime to add to everything and the whole place smelt delicious when it came out. I loved making burrito style wraps on our wedding day, it was proper sharing food which meant everyone was talking and passing bowls around to each other - perfect. Sally and Co. did an amazing job and everyone commented on how good the food was. There was so much left - we took it down to the beach the next day so everyone could have hog sandwiches!

One of the tables, with some of the side dishes on it

Some salads and fresh salsa

Shredded slaw, mexican bean salad

mmmmm....

 Dessert

Instead of having Sally do our desserts, we asked a few family members to make some cakes for us and we bought squillions of sweeties from Makro and make the most decadent sweet/cake table ever. It looked like a wicked child-eating witch should preside over it. I'm pretty proud of how it turned out, considering the only plan for it was in my head! My Mum made two cakes that looked like flower beds (and matched the table flowers) from Granny Louise's fruitcake recipe, Alex's Mum made her amazing raspberry Sachertorte, my sister made loveheart cookies and Alex's sister Amy (of The White Rabbit Bakery) made some incredible cupcakes that look like/are shaped in Ice Cream cones! They were so perfect for the seaside! My sister also picked us up a couple of extra shop bought cakes to add to the party...

 

Mum's cakes, made to Granny Louise's fruitcake recipe...

...decorated to look like the table felt flowers!

We decorated the tables with ice-cream sundae runners, paper doilies, Mum's flowers and an array of cake stands picked up from places like Ikea and TK Maxx over the last year or so. We also had a couple of tiny kitschy trays with 'Wedding Day' painted on the side that my Mum found in a charity shop! Oh and some seaside stuff too, like a fishing style net and some glass floats. The jars were a mix from Yorkshire Trading in Whitby, Ikea and also Mum's terrarium jar which was filled with flumps!

Jars of sweets, giant marshmallows and amazing cakes

om nom nom!

We had Giant Strawbs in our sweetie collection (my family always used to get them from Aunty Pat's cafe down by the beach), rock from Whitby and Drumsticks (Al's favourite) as well as heaps of massive American marshmellows on sticks. We did intend to roast these over the fires, but when the tents turned up they had to change the fuel so that the tops of the Tipi's could stay shut, so no roasting. Oh well, they looked awesome and people still ate them!

The tiny lacy baskets you can see were made by my sister, she set lace doilies into a cup shape using glue and a jam jar (I think!) Rach also stamped all our sweetie bags for us

We also popped a candy-necklace on each table place, when we were little we used to bite them in half and ping them at each other (actually they're kinda dangerous when you think about it) and sure enough, halfway through dinner they were whizzing all over the place and people were ducking and diving with grins on their faces! 

Evening Food

Probably the first thing we decided, is that on our wedding day we wanted to have fish & chips. Whitby fish is the best in the country so we went on the hunt for a Fish & Chip van for the evening. We were introduced to Matthew and Vicky of Whitby Seafish Ltd and their amazing van 'Winnie' (huge thanks to our caterer Sally for that!). They served up cod goujons and delicious chips with really interesting array of sauces (I liked lime mayo best) overlooking the bay in the evening. It was brilliant to see everyone munching away on hot fish and chips in the cool night, and there was always a little queue for the van!

Alcomoholic Beverages

After table wine and a lot of bubbly delicious champagne (thanks Mum & Dad, especially so for hiding a bottle of champagne - we've saved it for our Anniversary), it would have been rude not to hit up the amazing bar serving Yorkshire's finest World Top Brewery flavours. We wanted to keep as much as we could local to the Runswick Bay area, and the lovely folk at The Runswick Bay Hotel (Simon and Co.) sorted us out with a bar, glasses for the whole event, ice, beers and spirits and some very fun-loving staff too! They all had a wristband on by the end of the night, and some even had a cheeky trip to the photobooth too ;)

Two of our fantastic bar staff in the photobooth! <3