John's Grocery, Iowa City
Amazing lasagna by post
Our wedding is taking place in John’s parent’s yard and we plan to serve a buffet style linner. As we had only a month to plan everything, we assumed that finding a local place which does gluten free catering would be a problem. I’ve never had to deal with any sort of catering in the past but finding a place in south eastern Iowa to not only make gluten free food for us but to make it safely and cross contamination free didn’t sound like the simplest task!
Luckily for us we discovered a small supermarket in Iowa City (less then an hour away from where we’re getting hitched!) that can make us gluten free lasagna. Dee, the deli-catering manager at John’s Grocery said that gluten free lasagna would cost the same as ordinary lasagna which sounded great to me. I’m tired of getting ripped off and charged more for something safe to eat but they weren’t going to do that 🙂
Most importantly their practices of keeping gluten free preparation safe and cross contamination free for customers sounds good. When they have a gluten free order the kitchen is completely sanitised by staff one evening and then for a second time the following morning. Work is currently being done on the store to put in a 100% gluten free kitchen but unfortunately this won’t be up and running before our wedding.
They make four different types of lasagna at Johns. As we plan to order such a large amount (enough for 100 servings) I thought it would be nice to be able to try the lasagna in advance. As we are currently living on the west coast, a couple thousand miles from Iowa, this made sending samples to us a little more tricky but it happened! Dee prepared a couple of small lasagnas and sent them out overnight to San Francisco. When they arrived at 1pm the following day they were still chilling in the ice which surrounded them. All we had to do was heat them up and they were ready to eat! One was Italian sausage and the other was ground beef. Both were delicious but John and I agreed that we found the sausage one far tastier so we’ve decided to go for three large Italian sausage lasagnas and one vegetarian.
John’s are also making our wedding cake. Vanilla, tie-dye cake! Yummy!
