Saturday, October 18, 2008

A very vegan wedding

Wow - I haven't posted over here since early August. I guess that's what happens when you buy a house, work at a university and have a new school year begin, organize the first ever bicycle rally in your new town, and get married... blogging gets pushed onto the back burner a fair bit.

So the big news for today is that Annalise and I got married a few weeks ago. There was never any real doubt that we were going to have a vegan wedding, but there was discussion about how militant we were going to be... i.e. would we provide a meat dish to people who really really wanted one?

wedding_salad
The dinner was at a local restaurant that has been featured before on the Restaurant Makeover television show. They agreed, and were pretty delighted, to do a vegan dinner for us, and started us off with a carrot / ginger soup that I don't have a picture of, and which was followed by a Thai salad that was pretty darn filling all by itself.
wedding_maincourse
The Main Course was served as a trio with a Tomato Basil sauce:
-Cabbage roll (stuffed with sundried tomato and garlic infused rice pilaf)
-Vegetable wellington (spinach, tomato, leeks, mushrooms, carrots wrapped with a crisp filo pastry)
-Stuffed sweet pepper (filled with a wild mushroom couscous with peas and asparagus)

wedding_cake1
And the dessert was a vegan German chocolate cake.

wedding_cake2

To answer the militant question from up above - we were pretty militant. We didn't serve any meat etc, and the only concession we made was to offer milk/cream for people who might want dairy with their coffee or tea. The "butter" we used was a vegan Earth Balance spread.

Almost no one at our wedding really cared about the lack of a meat option for dinner. In the end, I think our dithering about the menu was just part of the pre-wedding paranoia that all weddings cause the bride and groom.

Even for the most hard-core meat and potatoes people, I think they just needed time to come around to the conclusion that it wasn't their wedding, and that one vegan meal wasn't going to kill them.

Especially a meal that was delicious anyway.