Manolo for the Brides

Many a USian will bust out (and dust off) the ol’ barbecue today, if they haven’t already done so. I was invited to at least two Memorial Day eatstravaganzas, but I declined both invitations for reasons I’ll likely talk about over at Manolo for the Home. Nowadays, I tend to just “stop by” most barbecues because I don’t eat meat and man cannot live on sides alone. But once upon a time…

The Beard and I weren’t always vegetarians. Our original intention was to have a DIY barbecue wedding limited to family only. That bit was scrapped when it became clear that my ginormous family would dwarf his tiny one. Then we started adding friends to the barbecue wedding guest list — first his, then ours, then mine — and the whole thing just plain fell apart.

Questions rained down upon us from critical loved ones. Who would man the smoker while a hundred people waited for their meat? Would there be enough time to whip up sides in the days and hours leading up to the wedding? The first element of our reception plan to go was DIY… all of my relatives who’d for years waxed poetic about how they were going to pitch in when I got hitched were suddenly nowhere to be found. Like Twistie recently said, help is a big (and usually necessary) part of successful DIY wedding.

We were frankly surprised to find that the catering menus of local barbecue joints weren’t all that cheaper than other restaurants, so we decided to shop around before settling on any one kind of cuisine. A few months later we stopped eating meat, found a catering company with an awesome veg menu, and that was one more item crossed off the pre-nuptial To Do list.

Image by soozums

So how does one have the perfect DIY barbecue wedding? I’d say that the first thing you want to do is order yourself some bulk napkins because sauce is a crafty beastie that will find some way to hitch a ride on clean formalwear. Oh, and don’t forget to solicit some assistants.

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