The Wedding of Mr. & Mrs. Gastro part 1

So maybe I needed the space of a couple months in order to properly write about my food-a-licious wedding day with Mr. Gastro. I'd really like to excuse my lack of writing with some line about needing time to process the beautiful event, and get settled into my new married life....and if you are inclined to use those lines to give me a pass for not writing for several months, knock yourselves out. I promise to make an effort to write more consistently of my food adventures to come. And to make it up to all of my very patient fellow gastro nerds, here is my completely epic, multi-entry, New-England-tastic play by play of all things food and romance from the Cape Cod wedding of Mr. & Mrs. Gastro.

First, I've got to set the scene: From the beginning, Mr. Gastro and I have said that what we really wanted for our wedding weekend was a gigantic farm house on Cape Cod. Something with enough bedrooms to house both sides of our now enormous family for several days, a kitchen that could stand up to the efforts of the famous Kitchen Sluts, and a yard where matt's Mom and Step-father could host a 30 person Lobster bake rehearsal dinner--oh, and you know, someplace for the ceremony and the reception. All within our fairly humble wedding budget.

We came to terms pretty early on with the fact that this house we had envisioned might in fact not exist, and so imagine our glee when not a month after getting engaged, we were shown around every inch of the Overbrook house on Bay End Farm in Bourne Massachusetts by a super chill organic farmer named Kofi. This was in January, so the house was closed and the farm covered in a blanket of snow, but we knew almost instantly that we had found our place. The house was a rustic 1920s gem, with eight bedrooms, a giant living area, a sun room, a little library, one sunny and super-functional farmhouse kitchen, and a dining table that seats twenty. As in people. Outside, a pretty little path lit with fairy lights cuts through the woods behind the house, runs over the bubbling brook, and leads to the dance hall nestled between the trees where we could set up a tent and tables and host our reception.

Now imagine this magical house on a mild, suede gray September afternoon, trees just starting to turn gold, and your new in laws setting up pots of seaweed and coolers full of crustaceans on the back lawn. My Long Island family had taken over the lodge next door to the house, my Mom and aunts were getting settled in the kitchen, Matt's adorable niece Dagny was boldly meeting what must have seemed to her to be about a hundred thousand new grown ups, and my Dad was gleefully running up to me with that Elvin smile he sometimes gets and exclaiming about how the house is "So cool! Completely awesome! I mean this is so cool!" I made a note to myself that if I happened to lose track of Dad at any point during the weekend, I would most likely find him happily tripping along one of the many footpaths that rambled around the property, exclaiming to himself about how awesome and cool everything is.

So this was the beautiful backdrop against which Mr. Gastro's and my culinary worlds collided for the first time. Now, my family is from New York, meaning that we have all at some point probably eaten a lobster. Most likely in a restaurant, or perhaps in stew form, but we've eaten them. Sometimes. Matt's family, on the other hand, is from Maine. When they eat Lobster, it's pronounced Lobstah, and it involves dropping the little buggers into a pot in your own backyard, covering them with seaweed, leaving them until they are red and dead and then slathering them with butter on a paper plate, alongside potato salad and corn on the cob. (Three guesses which preparation I prefer, and the first two guesses don't count.) The first time Matt ever took me to a cookout in Maine, I went in expecting hot dogs and hamburgers. When I was presented with my very own LOBSTER on a plate, I looked at Matt in wonder, and he coolly replied, "What? I told you we were going to a cookout in Maine." Right. Now imagine that New Yorker reaction multiplied about twenty times, and that is the sense of wonder and gratitude that was pouring forth from my family to Matt's for our very first meal together. It was our first night in the house, (or rather, in the back yard) and the gray afternoon had descended into a jet black Cape Cod evening, and a beachy, barely-there mist that wasn't ever quite rain served to soften everybody's edges and remind us with every whiff that we weren't exactly in Kansas anymore. Linda and Bill had worked non-stop since they had gotten to the house to present these two families with THIRTY FIVE LOBSTERS, along with chowder, salads, and blueberry cake, and the result was spectacular. To my New York family, my real live in laws from Maine preparing a lobster bake on Cape Cod was a regional novelty akin to if I had chosen to marry a man from New Orleans and asked his family to prepare gumbo. We were all simultaneously giddy, humbled, honored, and oh yeah...starving!

There have been fancier rehearsal dinners in the long history of such events. I'm sure there have even been glitzy rehearsal dinners in upscale restaurants with crisp white linens, where every guest gets their own lobster, and a waiter to crack it for them too. But I would make a strong argument that for uniting two families into one big one, few rehearsal dinners can touch ours. Paper plates, plastic forks and knives, jeans and flip flops, and every guest saturated up to the elbows with butter and lobster juice, pouring out praise onto your brand spankin' new relatives for the quality that we all seemed to rank among the highest valued in our own families--the ability to use food as a social adhesive, gluing together our ever expanding mix and match cast of characters with family recipes, regional specialties, and histories shared over home cooked meals.