By Bill Smith

The Daily Iberian

St. George Island, Fla. - It’s the beginning of summer and thoughts turn to a June wedding. And the best thing about a wedding is...the food.

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It may not be the best thing for the bride and groom but the attendants of the wedding can always look forward to a delicious meal. More often than not, the bride and groom don’t get to eat until the wedding begins to wind down.

More and more people are opting to prepare their own food rather than using catering companies. For Jenna and James Allen Jr., the thought preparation of their recent wedding included Cajun dishes such as crawfish etouffee, shrimp fettuccini and crab cakes.

Jenna Landry Allen always dreamed of a beach wedding. She and James chose the island community of St. George along Florida’s Gulf Coast.

“We brought the food we wanted with us,” Jenna Allen said. “We wanted to make sure the food was as good over there as it is here.”

Joy Trahan, mother of the bride, and her husband, Kim, loaded a double-axle enclosed trailer with a freezer to carry items such as shrimp, crabmeat and meatballs, along with the chips, snacks and beer. They hauled the trailer for the nearly 10-hour trip in order to try and make everything perfect for the wedding.

Joy Trahan said she got recipes from friends and purchased the items in Louisiana so the dishes would be just like “home-cooking.” Her contribution to the menu was a barbecue meatballs recipe, a staple at most weddings. Long-time friends of the family, Pam Broussard, Chantel Leblanc and Charlsie Hebert, not only contributed recipes for the special day, but took vacation days to drive to the beach resort and do all of the cooking. Broussard’s husband, Presley, became an ordained minister via the Internet to conduct the ceremony, as well.

The menu for the wedding included her mom’s barbecue meatballs recipe, Louisiana shrimp from the bride’s step-grandfather and step-grandmother, Hayward and Beverly Trahan of Delcambre, and crab cakes from Delcambre, Louisiana crabmeat caught and peeled by her grandmother, Ruby Hebert, and home-made chicken salad from her father, Bill Landry’s family.

The groom’s mother, Tammy Allen, threw a Cajun rehearsal dinner which included crawfish etouffee made with 11 pounds of Louisiana crawfish.

“I hope it’s not too runny,” Allen remarked at the dinner about her etouffee . “I usually don’t use that much crawfish.”

One diner responded, “That’s what the French bread is for, to sop up the juices.”

The wedding cakes were ordered from a cake company in Florida, but the couple brought a bit of Louisiana to the groom’s cake. James is a huge LSU fan and his chocolate groom’s cake was a model of Tiger stadium. It was a crowd pleaser, he said.

The chilly weather and rainy conditions did not deter the young couple from having the dream wedding. Just before the wedding began on Thursday, May 21, the clouds parted and the rain stopped and everything went off without a hitch, Jenna Allen

said.

On the last day at the beach house, the newly married couple went out and drew a heart in the sand and wrote their names.

They placed their rings in the center of the heart and took photographs for the wedding scrapbook.

As he knelt down, James Allen Jr. picked up his wife’s ring, placed it on her finger and looked lovingly into her brown eyes and said, “Do you think there are any of those meatballs leftover?”