baking craziness

We spent most of the weekend baking for yesterday's Auction & Pie Social.  Unfortunately, in the process of getting the boxes for the auction and getting the girls' stuff together, I blanked on actually packing the pies!  Thankfully, there were many pies there anyway and they were all delicious.
We made one box of breakfast goods: pumpkin muffins, whole wheat triple berry ricotta scones, a mini loaf of banana bread and a mini loaf of rhubarb bread.  Another bread box contained zucchini-banana-mint-pecan bread, earth bread (zucchini, carrot & banana), banana bread and rhubarb bread.  The apple box contained a jar of apple pie filling, a jar of apple butter, and a jar of apple sauce.

The hot box contained dried Thai chili peppers (from Jaimie's mom), canned chilies (my mom's), triple hot green salsa (my mom's), tongue tingler salsa (my mom's), and jalapeno jelly (that was ours).

We also donated a bottle of mead.  They all seemed to be well received, so that made us quite happy.
Some of the pies there were AMAZING.  My favorites were the ground cherry pie and the apple pie that had cute little cut out apples for the crust topping.  There was also a water pie, a Depression era recipe that had rum flavoring.  It was quite tasty.  We bid on and won a foursome of mini pies - water pie, lemon pie, pecan pie, and cream pie with raspberry jalapeno topping.  Tonight we'll be enjoying delicious pies made by the Temple of Pie with some of our homemade ice cream.   So yummy.

So what have we done lately?  Jaimie made some pasta with pesto yesterday, which was a delicious pesto that we'd frozen about a month ago.  Basically, it was basil, pecans, nutritional yeast and olive oil.  Pesto can be pretty much any herb with oil.  Nutritional yeast is a good idea, rather than Parmesan, if wanting to freeze it.  In our freezer we have nasturtium pesto and oregano pesto.  I'm looking forward to trying those.  We have more oregano outside still, and some mint, so we'll be making more pesto with those.

Today, Jaimie made roasted chicken, baked potatoes, and corn on the cob.  We'd frozen the corn on the cob when it was on sale this summer for local, organic deliciousness for only $3 a dozen.  We bought 6 dozen (minus what we ate then) so we'll get to eat it throughout the winter. 

This past weekend was also racking time for the two batches of beer.  After so much time, you've got to rack it into bottles.  We get to taste test as we go, so that's enjoyable.  In two weeks, he'll get some more beer to drink.  You've definitely got to plan ahead if you want a beer and have to wait 6-8 weeks.

My mead isn't fermenting as I'd like so I've got to re-pitch the yeast.  It's jasmine flavored, so we'll see how it tastes in a month or two.