Tag Archives: Terri Dann

In Love With: The Perfect Day

candela photoAndré spilled the beans a few weeks ago about the reason for my protracted absence-wedding planning. I had assumed “a simple, no frills wedding” couldn’t possibly take more than a few weeks to put together. Life, and the Birmingham wedding industry, however had other agendas. Despite my best efforts not to let the process turn me into a harpy, there were a few months in there where silly questions like buttercreme vs. white frosting were far more present in my daily thought process than they really needed to be.

That’s a nice way of saying I bordered on “basket-case” for a few months. Eventually, I woke up to one truth that I clung to like a life vest in churning waters. If you don’t want to go nuts while planning a wedding, hire vendors you trust and work well with … and then get the heck out of the way.

So I want to give public props to the three vendors who made our Big Day come together. It was everything I could have hoped for, and even more important, trusting their experience and talent made it easy on me. In each case, a few meetings or phone calls was all it took to develop a working concept. Then I let them loose to do what they do best, tried not to hover, and ended up being as delightfully surprised on our wedding day as any of our guests with how everything had been realized.

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In Love With: Chicken Salad

There is no entry for “Best Chicken Salad” in my trusty Menu of Menus, which leaves the title to be hotly disputed in all corners of our fair city. The arguments come down in some fairly defined quadrants: traditional celery vs. nouveau; with nuts vs. smooth; chicken chunks vs. pulled meat; dried fruit vs. those who shudder at the mention of raisins. What cannot be disputed is that every chicken salad eater in the Birmingham Metro area has their favorite recipe, and all other concoctions aren’t worth a crosswise sniff.

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