Blue Heron Catering and The Joy of Cooking
If you ask most people what their secret ingredient to a long career is, they may say do what you love. For Susan Joy of Blue Heron Catering in Easton, Maryland, that is her mantra.
I “Doing something you love, which sounds redundant, is what makes you happy,” says Joy who epitomizes her surname by marriage.
Susan’s company has been celebrating with area residents for decades. Before moving to Easton in 1999 from Lancaster, Pennsylvania via Philadelphia, Susan worked for a caterer much like the one she has become. Having children and doing catering jobs here and there, she started slowly after a successful party for a local businessman.
“It was perfect because I still wanted to raise my kids,” she says.
The business really gained traction after 2015, when her younger daughter Megan graduated from high school.
While she always loved life in the kitchen, Susan did not make that plan early on. Finding culinary school too costly, she decided to attend Penn State University for hospitality. Her husband David, whose family owned a wholesale meat company where his dad was a butcher, is a Johnson & Wales University Culinary School graduate and manages a hotel.
“I’m cooking while he helps out on the business side,” laughs Joy, whose stint working at a hotel led her back to her first passion: cooking. “I wanted to be in sales because it’s a pretty and shiny, but I’ve always loved being in the kitchen.”
While still in high school, Susan catered a bridal shower for a friend’s mom where she made salmon mousse pâté and seafood court bouillon from scratch. She helped pay for her own college tuition by making cookies and candies that she sold to her fellow students. Today, she plans the menus and prepares the food.
“There’s never a party we’re not looking forward to,” says Joy. “Logistics may not be as fun as the people are but feeding them is a pleasure for me.”
Whether providing regular meals for the students of Saints Peter & Paul Elementary School and The Country School, where they average about 60 brown bag lunches a day, Susan and her team are always in the kitchen planning, preparing, and cooking for a steadily growing schedule of parties and events.
Many of her dishes are a combination of fancy party food and home cooking: Skewered Chicken with Peanut Ginger Sauce, Sweet Potato Biscuits with Curried Chicken Salad, Short Rib Wellingtons, Cream of Crab Soup, Corn Fritters with Succotash Jam, Endive Stuff ed with Roquefort and Walnuts, and Roasted Tomato Bisque are just some of her more popular recipes tweaked over two decades of cooking. Susan’s Sugared Bacon Spirals have legions of fans and are practically a mainstay on all Blue Heron Catering menus and reason enough to attend.
Since 2020, bigger celebrations have been gaining traction. Call it the Covid Catch-Up. Weddings especially have been increasing in number for Blue Heron. Where a typical year might have two or three weddings, the company now has fifteen on the books through 2023. Most will be held in September and October. These traditional events are becoming more colorful, detailed, and theme-oriented, influenced by site visits, tastings, brides-to-be, in-laws, friends, and cable TV and social media (thank you, Pinterest and Instagram mood boards!)
“Our best clients have been there since the early days,” says Joy. A favorite memory dates back twenty years to a family of Americans who, after moving to London, returned every year for a month in a rented house on the Eastern Shore to visit with their stateside family. “I was their personal chef,” adds Joy. “They loved food and appreciated everything I did.”
These days, it’s more about parties. The Blue Heron team, which comprises mostly family members, will cater events from Washington to Annapolis to Bethany Beach (travel fees are added) but most are on the Eastern Shore. Megan manages the social media posts and maintains the company website. Eldest daughter Kendall, married with a child on the way, was on track for medical school but decided she wanted to work in the family business. And both daughters help in the kitchen as well. The addition of baker Destine Rich has made life a lot easier. A graduate of the Caroline County Culinary Arts Program, Rich also studied at the Escoffier and creates and cooks all the sweet treats.
And while the pandemic is a distant memory, or so we hope, aftershocks are still felt across the supply chain. To ensure enough of their favorite ingredients and supplies are on hand, Blue Heron purchased additional refrigeration, noting that good quality high fat European butter is as non-negotiable as meat from a beloved Fells Point distributor.
Shopping locally when she can, Joy will not scoff at a request for asparagus in January and will do her best to make it happen, as long as it meets her high expectations. The company has also expanded into limited retail sales, with sandwiches, soups, quiches, and baked goods available at Oxford Social, part of Highland Creamery in Oxford. And stop by Town & Country Liquors for frozen meals, comfort foods like meat loaf and mashed potatoes, tenderloin tips on egg noodles, turkey tetrazzini, and chicken pot pie.
LIGHTNING ROUND WITH SUSAN JOY
Monday morning routine: Starts on Sunday night, putting in the food orders for Monday morning. Running to the store to get the last-minute things that my purveyors can’t get, while Megan picks up coffee from Rise Up down the street. And cleaning up any mess from the weekend.
Favorite Dish: My personal favorite is chocolate chip cookies. Our client favorite is curried chicken salad on sweet potato biscuits.
If You Could Have a Kitchen Super Power: A mental timer that knew when everything was done. We try to set timers but to time five or six things at the same time, well, that’s a common conundrum of any home cook.
Blue Heron Catering
421 Dover Road, Easton, Maryland
(410) 822-8204
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Food photography by Blue Heron Catering.
