Juniper Festival Catering

A few months ago I was asked if I'd want to do some catering.  I said sure, yeah, and the dollar signs rolled around behind my eyeballs.  With gardening season coming on, the idea of extra cash in my pocket turned into huge barrels of composted chicken shit, strong tomatoes, and all the other stuff that comes from a well attended garden, which is something that can be done on a shoe string budget, but a shoe string is a shoe string, and so I accepted the offer.  Time went by, the menu was planned, a constant tape loop of things to-do played in my mind.  Delivery day, I woke up at five in the morning and made twenty-seven feet of sandwich.  

The trouble, though, with catering the occasional party, or in this case, small press festival, is that, if you don't have business relationships with distributors and purveyors, well, you're kind of forced to pay retail prices for all your supplies, and that hurts.  Nonetheless, I wanted to give the guests the best food that I reasonably could, and that meant, tearfully at times, watching my profit margin take a nose-dive.  All the same, I feel like I did pretty well, especially considering the guests scarfed down 27 feet of sandwich, three enormous assorted pickle platters, 10 bags of Hungry Ghost crackers, and about 20 lbs. of hummus I'd made from scratch the day before.  Oh, and some fruit.  

Notice the conspicuous lack of those ugly, black plastic catering trays that are a standard of the catering biz?  Yep.  For that I must thank my sweetie, the proprietor of Pinch, for she let me borrow some stoneware that gave my spread a certain je ne sais quoi that upped its class factor and lent to the food the respect it deserved.  It's really a shame to put beautiful food on ugly plastic, but then, with the average caterer, it's sort of a moot point: ugly food goes on ugly surfaces.