I haven’t been writing much on this blog lately (as you well know if you’re a subscriber), but I am working away on m cookbook, my compendium of party food, tentatively titled Feeding the Masses without Losing Your Mind. I had said that the last thing the world needs is another cookbook, but I’d already written quite a bit of material for it. So I’m putting it together, editing and testing the recipes, and saying more than you could possibly imagine on various food-related topics, such as proper muffin mixing technique and how to make many mini tarts.
Saturday I got to put some of my ideas into practice as I was asked to do the food for a outdoor wedding. My dear friend Nancy’s second-oldest daughter got married in their back yard, a necessity for this era of social distancing, and you just would not believe all the work they did making their already-lovely back yard into a veritable fairyland. Strings of lights! Acres of organza/netting/tulle, much of it wrapped around said lights! Flowers! Refreshment tents! So great.
Pretty bad, huh? I’ve posted about these muffins before and have used my new recipe card app to write out what I did the time before this. They came out pretty well in that version but still didn’t have the rise I wanted, so I tried yet another combination of leavening with the awful result you see here. They tasted fine, but boy! People had to be pretty hardy to risk eating one. I made four dozen of these things for the Easter breakfast at our church Sunday and only brought home about a dozen, so it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Still and all, though!
Not a huge event. I wasn’t putting on a wedding, or a political convention. History was not going to be changed in any way if we ran out of food. (It might have been if someone had gotten sick from the food, but that didn’t happen.) We probably ended up with around 100 people, and while the last 10 or so people didn’t get any salad everyone got a burrito. And there was plenty of dessert. All in all a very successful evening. People lingered and lingered, always a sign of a good party.
Last of three posts on the role of celebrations in our lives. I mentioned earlier, and perhaps many reading this post already know, that Jesus’ first recorded miracle occurs at a wedding celebration: “On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples” (John 2:1-2 ESV). So, just to point out the obvious, Jesus and the disciples aren’t hermits; they aren’t cut off from society. They’re invited to this occasion. Jesus doesn’t rebuke anyone for spending all that money on a feast. He contributes to it, and in a high-quality way; the governor of the feast says, “Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now” (v. 10). I mentioned in 
So, here’s the second of three posts this week on why people need celebrations and how to get the most out of them. I’m writing this as I sit at our dining room table with some of my favorite in-laws, my brother- and sister-in-law and my father- and mother-in-law. (We are eating a late lunch to feed the poor starving visitors who weren’t fed on the plane. Be sure to read the hospitality blog tomorrow to get the recipe for the wonderful chicken salad I fed them.) The siblings-in-law just got into town from Seattle for a wonderful eight days which will include some special get-togethers including Christmas dinner, a big birthday dinner for Carol (since her birthday is Dec. 30th), and a pizza party for Monday Night Football. Is all this really necessary? There’s expense and effort involved. Why bother?
I guess you could call me a kind of volunteer unofficial events planner. (I wonder when the term “events planner” entered the world’s vocabulary.) I wrote a previous post over on the hospitality blog about the