Love Autumnal

Ryan and I got married one year ago today! Fall is my favorite time of year, and we found a lot of inspiration in the season for our wedding. So in honor of our first anniversary, I took a look back at some of the fall flavors, colors, and details that we incorporated into our big day. 

We held our wedding at the magnificent Columbus Park Refectory, an off-the-beaten-path Chicago Park District venue located on the city's West Side. The ceremony was in the covered outdoor pavilion that overlooked a lagoon. With dramatic arched windows on three sides of the building, the surrounding trees provided a natural fall color palette of red, orange, yellow, and green. 

Anticipating cool weather, the plan was to warm up our guests with some hot apple cider before the ceremony. I never dreamed temps would reach the 80s, but they did, so we served it chilled instead. (While I was ecstatic that everyone would feel comfortable outside, I was mildly disappointed that it was too warm to wear this cozy red crocheted shrug I had bought on Etsy.) 

The ceremony felt very mystical and romantic! Golden late-afternoon light streamed through the pavilion and cast a warm glow all around. Many guests later told us that right before the ceremony began, a swirl of sun-dappled leaves blew right in the spot where we would marry. That is a moment I truly wish I had seen.

Ryan breaks the glass. Mazel tov!

Apple season peaks in October in the Midwest, so we decided to use the fruit as both centerpieces and party favors. About a week before the wedding, I went apple picking with my mom, sister, and future mother-in-law. We picked hundreds of apples (and rewarded our hard work by indulging in some amazing cider doughnuts).

The empire apples, placed in dark woven baskets on each table, added of a splash of red to the dining room. Since the space already had such distinctive colors and decor - with its Spanish-influenced style of dark wood beams, arched windows, and ornate chandeliers - we kept everything else neutral to let the unique details of the room shine through.

We invited guests to take some apples home with them in these little brown bags with hand stamped labels.

The entire apple project turned out to be quite the logistically intensive DIY undertaking - and only one that I recommend if you have your heart set on the idea like I did! - so I was gratified to see our guests, like my 4-year-old nephew, enjoying them. 

I wanted everyone to share a meal together that was as seasonal and local as possible. While our catering choices were limited to the CPD's preferred vendor list, our caterer sourced some of the food from Michigan and worked with us to develop a fall-inspired meal. We featured the menu on chalkboard-painted wooden wine crates at the place card table, where the florist added some gourds, flowers, and leftover apples to create a harvest theme. 

Dessert was a no-brainer. Every Thanksgiving, Ryan makes pumpkin pies from scratch, and I looooove apple pie (especially a la mode). We offered those two choices with a scoop of vanilla or cinnamon ice cream from this local favorite pie shop.

The kids were all over the dessert table.

But getting back to the apples, they even made their way into our ketubah (a Jewish marriage contract). Ryan's second cousin, a budding artist, drew a tree with 10 red apples to represent our unforgettable wedding date - 10.10.10. Emily pulled it all together with a precious handmade border and designed the tree along a river of our vows that Ryan and I wrote together. Which brings me to the other inspiration for our wedding.

Paddling. Ryan and I first met when I signed up for one of his kayak classes on the Chicago River. Our huppah poles were four hand carved Greenland kayak paddles.

We chose the Columbus Park Refectory because it overlooks two lagoons in the park (originally, we wanted to offer our guests the option of going canoeing but alas, that didn't work out). Our invitations featured paddles, too, and I even walked down the aisle to one of my favorite folk songs, The Water is Wide, while Ryan waited to become my husband.

A poem about autumn and love that a friend read during the ceremony probably best summed up the spirit of our fall-inspired wedding day.

Love Autumnal

By Oliver Jenkins

My love will come in autumn-time

When leaves go spinning to the ground

And wistful stars in heaven chime

With the leaves' sound

Then, we shall walk through dusty lanes

And pause beneath low-hanging boughs,

And there, while soft-hued beauty reigns

We'll make our vows

Let others seek in spring for sighs

When love flames forth from every seed;

But love that blooms when nature dies

Is love indeed

(All photos by the effervescent Candice Cusic and her brave assistant Justin, who showed no fear during the hora.)

Special Gifts

It's a funny thing, but Ryan and I struggled to put together a gift registry for our wedding. We felt torn between "we're older and we already have everything we need" to "well, we could replace a few things" to "let's go a little non-traditional and get some fun stuff."

We also had different ideas of what we wanted, and there was some discomfort with registering at one of those places, you know the ones, that have simplified the gift giving process to credit card information and a single click.

Where is the humanity in that?

We ended up for the most part with a list that reflected both of our tastes and desires -- a somewhat eclectic but meaningful set of items that ranged from essential and quirky kitchenwares to our favorite Illinois wine to a respected charity to the most random thing Ryan has ever found online (and that's saying a lot) -- but we still didn't quite provide enough items for our guests to buy for us. We also listed some gifts on a site that is not one-click-and-you're-done, but may require a little more legwork depending on what it is.

This led to some phone calls, "There isn't much left on your registry, what should I tell so-and-so to get you" and "Maybe you should put more on there."

Cue even more angst and guilt about planning this wedding.

The push-pull of planning a wedding that doesn't entirely conform to the traditional American wedding (or the Wedding Industrial Complex (WIC) as one of the few sane wedding bloggers out there calls it) was one of the biggest challenges for me.

There is, on one hand, a strong desire for the wedding to reflect us. After all, "it's all about you" and "it's your day" is drummed into every bride's head from the second she gets engaged if not earlier. But if you don't do things "the way it's supposed to be done", then you've got some 'splaining to do!

I understand the idea that wedding gifts are supposed to help a bride and groom create a home, that our invited guests love us and want to give us gifts that we want, and that we risk getting the dreaded "off list" items that we don't want. I also realize how ungrateful I probably sound right now. I mean, who complains about getting presents? Especially when people want to give them to you. But I wanted to feel authentic about our gifts, about every aspect of our wedding, and the act of registering ran somewhat counter to that.

But when the months of preparations finally culminated into the wedding weekend, I got the gifts I was looking for -- to have our family and friends with us to witness our marriage and, in many cases, to meet each other, making the world around us become that much more tightly woven and interconnected.

Our wedding was full of so many special gifts, some intangible, others creative, personal, and surprising. These were some of my favorites.

-- Serving chilled instead of hot apple cider before our outdoor ceremony because of the 80 degree weather. In early October, it was warm enough for our guests to be comfortable in the outdoor spaces at our venue, which positively gleamed with autumn colors.

-- The gentle breeze that lifted up the top of our huppah. This had stymied us the night before, when we were up until 1:30am figuring out how to attach the tulle covering to our handmade wooden kayak paddles without the material dipping low in the middle.

-- If we could get frequent flier miles for the distance that many friends and family flew to witness us exchange vows in person, we could have flown anywhere for free.

-- Watching the seating chart come to life. My sister and I joked about how I wanted to sit in the corner, as far away from the center of attention as possible. But I really wanted to watch the room during dinner, to see our guests get to know each other over a delicious meal inspired by the fall harvest (and damn, it was good!).

-- Seeing the line for pie snake around the entire room with hardly any leftovers at the end of the night.

-- Leaving with empty centerpieces, which had been filled with hundreds of apples picked by me, my mom, my sister, and my mother-in-law earlier in the week. We had provided bags for each guest to take some home.

-- Receiving a trove of recipes from family and friends, bound into a hardcover book with photos that sparked memories of hilarious moments, family outings, and long-gone-but-not-forgotten loved ones (thanks to my crafty and persistent sister). This book is the perfect way to illustrate two families joining together, now connected through Ryan and me.

Since this is a blog that focuses on food and home cooking, we are going to blog our way through that book. What better way to get to know each other's worlds than through recipes and the stories behind them.

That is priceless.

Outside the Box

I usually have a Passover seder with my family (with the exception of two years ago when we had a rather unusual seder in Mexico). But this year, due to a variety of reasons, we were on our own.

I can't say that we had an actual seder (although we briefly considered downloading this). We ate many of the traditional foods, however the meal didn't quite come together without a hitch.

A lot of the food, I must admit, came from a box, including matzos, macaroons, and matzo ball soup. While this isn't the worst thing in the world, we had some minor mishaps too. As the eggs hard boiled, several cracked in the roiling water causing poofy whiteness to burst out of the shell. No big deal. The chicken burned too, just a little.

But the one item that I feel like I truly made from scratch and turned out to be the best part of the meal, I thought, was charoset. This is a sweet mix of apples, honey, cinnamon, nuts, and wine. Despite how good it tastes, scooped on a piece of matzo, charoset has a somewhat darker meaning. It symbolizes the mortar that the Jews used while they were slaves in Egypt.

I followed my mom's recipe, only she had no measurements, just ingredients. Keep mixing them together until it tastes right, she said. So that's what I did.

Mom's Charoset Recipe

Chop apples and walnuts* in the food processor.

Add cinnamon, honey, sweet red wine**, and golden raisins to taste.

Mix.

*We used almonds

**We used white riesling