Inspiration for your wedding menu

Building your wedding menu can be intimidating. Your caterer has a big, long list of delicious-sounding appetizer, chef station, entree and dessert options and you have no idea how to choose the right combination of dishes to create *the* perfect lineup. After all, the food and the entertainment make the wedding. Caterers and banquet halls will invite you in for an official food tasting months before the wedding, which is the best way to tell what you like and what looks great on the menu with what...but you *can* exercise some creative control over your menu by asking your chef to customize a few dishes. For instance, Joe and I just watched a cable TV wedding special tonight, and we flipped over Food Network Star Guy Fieri's pomegranate honey chicken (we looked it up online right away). While we could ask the caterer to tweak a few of the dishes for our wedding menu, we're also looking -- and this is the big advice of this posting -- for ideas for other wedding weekend events. Maybe we'll do the pomegranate chicken for a wedding weekend lunch with our visiting friends or pre-wedding houseguests, or maybe that will become a great dish for our future married life dinner plans in general. We saw a few of Guy's recipes online, and we're new fans. So, engaged couples, visit www.foodtv.com for inspiration on your wedding and everyday life recipes collection -- I love how they classify each dish from easy to complicated. Since both Joe and I know our way around the kitchen, it was a thrill beyond belief to spend the evening talking both wedding plans and future lifestyle plans. On top of a wonderful evening of dinner out, going to the bookstore to cruise the new selections, and a holding-hands walk along Main Street, this was the proverbial cherry on the sundae.