Planning the wedding menus for your wedding feast and for the rehearsal dinner the night before can result in an acute case of prenuptial jitters. To help you choose meals that will be festive, satisfying and delicious, we asked some experts for their advice.

First and foremost, decide what type of affair you'll be having, suggest Marcy Blum, an event and wedding planner in Manhattan and the author of "Weddings For Dummies" and "The Wedding Kit For Dummies" (Hungry Minds, Inc.).

If it's a formal sit-down meal, the foods you choose will be different from when you have a casual buffet dinner, cocktail reception, brunch or lunch. If you wedding is a sit-down formal affair, beef is the entree of choice, Blum says. "A wedding is the only event you will ever thrown where you'll have such an eclectic group of people," Blum says. "It can be difficult to please everyone. Beef is still the most popular main course option, with salmon or another fish as a backup for those who don't eat meat."

A favorite beef entree among he clients is sweet roasted garlic and peppercorn roasted tenderloin of beef served with a Merlot wine sauce, matchstick potato and sweet potato tart with leeks and herbs and asparagus bundles.

However, she cautions, don't opt for an exotic species of seafood for this occasion.

"As much as you may want to serve Chilean sea bass to 150 people, this is not a good idea," Blum says. "Especially for older people and children, this will be a scary dish. you are much better off with a familiar dish, like tuna, or salmon."

A second option, for a more casual dinner party, is to have "station buffets" such as a carved meat station, a vegetarian station, offering salads and dips, and an Asian station featuring dim sum, sushi and Peking duck. If you opt for this kind of informal theme, it's a good idea to have eight-inch plates rather than 12-inch plates, Blum says.

"Smaller plates encourage people to keep noshing over a period of time rather than piling their larger plate just once,"she explains.

Instead of dinner, you may want to host a lunch for your guests, Blum says, at which you'd offer assorted sandwiches, chips, dips, and salads. Sandwiches could range from grilled chateaubriand on baguettes with spicy baby arugula and onion confit to grilled chicken on focaccia with saffron aioli and roasted peppers. For salads, she recommends both a mixed baby greens salad with julienned vegetables tossed with a light lemon tarragon vinaigrette and a wild rice salad with diced fruit and slivered almonds in a citrus vinaigrette dressing.

If you simply can't decide to go with a formal sit-down dinner or a casual buffet, compromise with a cocktail hour and then a seated dinner. Or consider an elegant two-hour cocktail reception at which you'll serve delicious little bites: crab cakes, vegetarian dim sum and skewered shrimp, for instance.

As for the rehearsal dinner the night before the wedding, it should be more informal, upbeat, and loosely structured, Blum says. "It's almost an extended icebreaker for the rest of the occasion," Blum says. "Throw place cards into a hat or let people sit wherever they want. His can be a meal that is a lot less elaborate than a wedding dinner.

It should be as different as possible from the wedding so people don't feel like they have been tuxedoed for the whole weekend. You really want to encourage your guests to get to know each other before the wedding."

One possible suggestion for the rehearsal dinner, she says: a real southern Italian feast, with spaghetti, carafes of red wine and cold beer.

"If you plan to host a rehearsal dinner oat home, make sure it emphasizes family," says Michele Bates, a sous-chef at Fabulous Foods, a catering company with a variety of sites, including Lyndhurst and Sunnyside. "you want to keep it very simple," Bates recommends. "Have all dishes that you can prepare in advance."

To start off the meal, offer crudites with a three-bean dip. A nice serving suggestion is to buy brown terracotta pots in different sizes(four-inch to ten-inch pots work better) and have a different vegetable in each pot: baby carrots in one pot, radishes in one, asparagus stalks and celery in others.

For a main course, fennel poached salmon with roasted asparagus and roasted tomatoes may be made a day ahead, says Bates. She likes to serve this over field greens with a light herbed vinaigrette. Dessert could be a frozen lemon mousse with a raspberry coulis. If kids will be at the rehearsal dinner, plan to have plenty of oatmeal cookies and chocolate chip cookies on hand.