Mary, Queen of Yum!

I met Mary when she was temping at the non-profit I was working at in DC. She was really friendly, funny and patient. When I was asked to coordinate a new program, the first thing I did was tell my boss he had to go upstairs and insist the reception temp, Mary, applied for my old job. He did and she did and the rest is history. Mary and I worked with high school students for the republics of the former Soviet Union. I managed 40 smart but mischievous high schoolers and she manage high school exchanges. We spent a lot of time together (we were a department of two), bounced ideas off each other and had a few laughs. My students got themselves into plenty of trouble.

Although Mary was great at shuffling kids around and managing teachers from an array of countries, her true talents lay in the kitchen. I can't tell you how nice it was to come in on Monday to Mary's delicious weekend creations. The strawberry pies, the various curds, oh the beer and cheese bread! She always said she wanted own a bakery. She doesn't own one yet but she's working at a fabulous (a signature word of hers) one now. I'm so happy she's getting to do what she loves. How many of us are that lucky?

When Mr. Joey first got engaged, one of the first things we knew is that we didn't want cake. Mr. Joey doesn't like cake and I don't like it enough to make a case for it. Our original idea was to serve pies. Mr. Joey is huge pie lover. He'll eat any kind but pecan. Pie?! Who makes pies better than Mary? So I asked her if she'd make us wedding pie, and she said YES! I know what you're thinking, aren't we doing cream puffs? Yes, we're doing cream puffs. The more we thought about it, the more we realized pie was about Mr. Joey and not about us. But cream puffs? That's so us! So we changed our minds and I ask Mary if she could do cream puffs. She said yes and all was good again.

And then time passed and I realized maybe it wasn't the best thing to have Mary make the cream puffs. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not sure anyone could make any as good as hers, but I was concerned about time and freshness. Cream puffs have to be eaten fresh. A stale cream puff? Not good. Not many taste good made the night before. To get all the cream puffs done for the wedding, Mary would have to spend the day before the wedding make cream puff shells in a tiny kitchen and spend the morning of the wedding filling them. That's the other thing, I didn't want her to spend her time in Seattle in a kitchen. If she made the cream puffs, she would have missed the wedding ceremony and probably the rehearsal dinner. She'd be running around the reception trying to manage finishing touches and what fun is that?

So I looked around and actually found a Pho (Vietnamese Beef Noodle Soup) restaurant that sells there yummy cream puffs. The owner said they bake and fill their cream puffs really early every morning. Perfect! 200 of $100? You can't beat that! So I emailed Mary and told her the news. I think she was a little relieved. She just baked a wedding cake for a friend and didn’t get to enjoy as much of the wedding as she would have liked.

Oh, but I was done with Mary. Just because she wasn't making the cream puffs doesn't mean she wouldn't be making anything.

I mentioned before that we're having to rearrange our ceremony/picture schedule because of some annual Seattle festivities I hadn't planned on. We thought about renting a bus, but it's just not in the budget. I don't really want to move the ceremony up - especially since the invitations are printed and out. So the solution is to take all the wedding pictures before the ceremony. Not such a huge deal until you realize that the Joey wedding starts at 10am. Yikes! So we're asking guest who want to be in pictures to get there early. We're also asking vendors (hair/make-up and photographers) and the wedding party to get there an hour earlier than scheduled. To make up for this we want to set up a breakfast bar. Think candy bar but with yummy breakfast goods and much needed coffee and tea.

What are we serving? Well, you'll just have to wait for that!

Did you change your mind about using a friendor because you knew it would either be too much of a financial strain for them or because you knew they wouldn't have any time to enjoy themselves?