Poppy Seed Chicken Salad {and wedding, part one}

I think I have finally, mostly, recovered from wedding craziness. I still have three thousand thank you cards to write, and parts of my house still look like a bomb went off (too many presents, too few cabinets), but otherwise I’m OK. I spent nearly a week feeling so exhausted that I was convinced I must have some horrible disease or something. But I’m finally feeling back to normal, so I guess it was indeed just some post-wedding fatigue. There are worse problems to have, I suppose.

My wedding week wouldn’t have been a good wedding week if it hadn’t started off stressful. I was supposed to leave the Wednesday before the wedding to head up north. I’d been obsessively checking the weather for Cape Cod and hoping for sun. I never even thought to be worried about the weather in Meridian. But just a few days before I was supposed to hop on my flight, Hurricane Isaac reared his ugly head. And guess what day he was supposed to hit Meridian? Wednesday! Of course.

Luckily, my flight eeked out Wednesday morning right before the rain rolled in. Phew. Crisis averted. Thursday brought tornadoes to Meridian, so then we started to stress about Nick’s Friday morning flight as he sat in the bathtub, listening to the sirens. But after all the worrying, his flight managed to make it out, too. Hurray!

The few days leading up to the wedding were not very fun. Whoever enjoys planning a wedding is just nutso. We were running around like chickens with our heads cut off, doing last minute errands like, er, buying and assembling 120 favors. Yeah… I left a few things til the last minute. {PSA: No one cares about favors. No one even takes them. SO DON’T WASTE YOUR MONEY!}

Finally Friday arrived, Nick arrived, and I decided to stop worrying about things and start having fun. Whatever wasn’t done at that point wasn’t going to get done, and it probably didn’t matter anyways.

Then I got back to back phone calls telling me that A. all the dad’s got the wrong color tuxes (thanks a lot, Men’s Warehouse) and B. my photographer wasn’t going to be able to make it and they were sending someone else. So much for not worrying. The tuxes weren’t a big deal compared to the photographer, so I just gave in and went with the flow on that one. It turned out fine.

The photographer on the other hand… kind of a big deal. Especially since the photographer was the one thing I really cared about and the one thing I actually spent more than 5 minutes researching. I quickly Googled my replacement photographer, only to find out that he is not only a wedding photographer, but also a pet photographer. Yes, a pet photographer. As in, he photographs tiny ugly dogs dressed up in costumes. AWESOME!! Thanks, unnamed photography company, who will not be getting very nice online reviews from me, thanks.

Anyways, once friends and family started arriving on Cape Cod, I managed to momentarily forget about the photographer, too, and finally relaxed.

Saturday morning we had a great time with a whole bunch of our friends and family at the beach. The weather was perfect, and it was looking like it would hold out for Sunday, our wedding day, as well.

Next up was a fairly intense wedding rehearsal.

I’m an very laid back but our Navy chaplain has that military precision in him and made sure everyone did everything perfectly– I actually thought he might kick some of our slacker wedding party out of the ceremony for standing 2 centimeters too far left! Haha!

I’m sure I’ll thank him when all of my pictures come back looking great because everyone is standing so perfectly spaced!

Then it was time to party!

We had our rehearsal dinner at the Coonamessett Farm in Falmouth. It’s a big farm with gardens and lots fun animals like turkeys, goats, alpacas, even a parrot!

We had 9 kids there and they had a great time cruising around the farm. Plenty of the adults did too.

We had a Jamaican buffet, which was delicious, and of course, the wine was flowing.

Since most of our guests were in town Saturday night as well, we had a post-rehearsal dinner gathering at the Holiday Inn bar to meet up with everyone!

The next day was the wedding, but that will have to wait until another post– I think I’ve babbled on long enough for one day! I supposed you want a recipe now? This is a food blog, after all. Ok, here’s a quick one!

Poppy Seed Chicken Salad

• 1/4 cup Greek yogurt
• 3 tbsp mayonnaise
• 2 tbsp spicy mustard
• 2 large chicken breasts, cooked and diced
• 1 stalk celery, thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup dried cranberries
• 1/4 cup toasted walnuts, chopped
• 1 1/2 tbsp poppy seeds
• Salt & pepper, to taste

In a bowl, mix together yogurt, mayo and mustard. Add chicken, celery, cranberries, walnuts and poppy seeds and toss everything together. Season with salt & pepper.

Serve on a sandwich or salad!