Are your struggling to plan the food for your wedding reception and lacking any good ideas? Or maybe you are organizing a wedding shower for a friend and want some creating fun food ideas at the wedding reception. Food can be a challenge beucase it is a very important and long lasting memory that many of your guests will have of the event. It is therefore important to plan carefully and have a great menu prepared but also not overdo the amount of food or spend money uselessly for either the reception or shower.

This article will help give you some ideas to still throw a great shower or reception but save you tons of money. Before jumping into some of the ideas it is important to think about the them and type of your wedding. If you are having a very traditional wedding then it is often easier to cater the event. Since it is so formal the reception should reflect this and be more of a formal dinner. In that case it is always easier to pay for someone to do the catering. However if you are having a fun family and friends wedding that is more down home and not traditional then by all means many of these ideas will help you save time and money.

Pot Luck
This one is often done at wedding where the couple simply can not afford the expense of the time involved in having the event catered. They instead forgo some of the formality for a more comfortable atmosphere filled with family, friends and good times.

One easy way to save money is to simply ask people to bring a dish with them to the wedding. This was the way it was often done in the past and still a wonderful way to save time and money yet have a very nice feel for the event.

In organizing pot luck you will want to organize what people are bringing and try to provide a balance of foods among the group. You want to avoid ten people all brining the same potato salad dish. After finding out what people are bringing or even assigning them categories of food to bring then you can try and provide some of the bigger parts and fill the gaps. For example if you were to provide the main dish and then fill in with other smaller dishes that are missing then you would have a well stocked pot luck.

BBQ
A barbeque is another fun idea for a wedding that will give it a very comfortable family style feeling to the reception or even at a wedding shower. You can choose to either run the barbecue on your own or simply hire someone to come and do that part of it for you. This will allow you to enjoy the event and sit with friends. You can often find very experienced barbeque chefs that will work for far less then a caterer will.

Catering
Another easy but possible expensive option can be to have the event completely catered.