Getting started.

Well I have never blogged before and I have had a few people that said I should start a blog about my baking expeditions. I gave in and decided to give it a try. So here is a little bit about me. I'm a 26 year old mother of a beautiful and crazy 3 yr old Tagen! I have been a stay at home mom since July 2008 which is when we decided to move our family from my hometown of Reno, NV to Fort Collins, CO. We wanted to be closer to my in-law's with out moving to WY. (they live in Gillette, WY.)

After a year of being really bored I wanted something to do with my time I'm a sucker for good food and the holidays were coming up so I decided to start dabbling in pie making. The first time I ever baked like most of us was in Home Ec. class in the 8th grade. My apple pie was the best one in the class. :-). After that I baked a few boxed cakes here and there but in September 2009 that all changed.

I'm a member of a pagan group called Northern Colorado Covenant of the River (NCCR) every Sunday evening that holds a pot luck so we can have dinner and discussions together. I enjoy having a lot of people to cook for and I needed some thing to make. The fall was coming on and I had been craving apple pie like none other. So I went and got the 9" Paula Dean pie pan from Walmart and every thing else I needed for the pie. I had tweaked a recipe from www.allrecipes.com I like sweet apples in my pie personally I just cut back on the sugar a bit. I did a lattice top on in as well! It came out perfect! My Pie was devoured and my head was swimming with compliments! I haven't looked back since then!! I made a few more apple pies for NCCR after that!

After getting such good reviews on my pies I really wanted to make on for my in-laws I don't get a chance to cook for them very often so I like to when I can. So on one of our trips up to see them I decided to make them a pie. It was kind of a spur of the moment trip and my mother in-law just so happened to have every thing I needed! She has her own apple trees on her property so we used the ones from it. They produce fairly small apples though, I'm talking slightly larger then a golf ball small here! It took my father in-law and I quite a while to get them cut up. It was pat 9 pm by the time we were done, so I put the apples in a lemon water bath and put them in the fridge overnight. I also let the dough rest in the fridge in the pie pan over night as well. I finished putting it together in the morning and baked it! My mother in-law is not a huge pie fan and is not like pie crust at all normally but she loved mine!! She told me it was the best pie she had ever eaten!!!!

The pie made from tiny apples! :)

I brought 4 doz Pumpkin cupcakes w/ a ginger cream cheese frosting to NCCR for our Halloween ritual. By the end of the night I think there were only 5 of them left! lol!! :) I had found the pumpkins at Walmart but they were only there for like 2 weeks. When I had gone back to get more they were all gone :(

We enjoyed our Thanksgiving dinner with NCCR since my husband was on call that weekend. For our dinner I made quite a few things actually. I knew I wanted to make Pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving but I was hard up to find any fresh pumpkins and I was starting to get a little worried. Then I went to a birthday party at The Farm at Lee Martinez park

and stumbled upon a huge pile of pie pumpkins for $1 a piece in there barn! I got three really nice sized pumpkins. I made 2 pumpkin pies (I had to go get a second PD pie pan) After making those pies I will never again use canned pumpkin!!! lol!! each pie had one pumpkin each in it and it was not qwute enough to fill up the pie dishes. (future note need I an extra pumpkin) I also made a pumpkin/sweet potato/butternut squash soup (fresh pumpkin here as well) I also made deviled eggs half of them had green olives in them and the other half were classic deviled eggs! Oh did I mention this dinner had 31 people in attendance!!! Sadly I don't have any pictures of these endeavors. :( But I might be able to get some from someone in NCCR! :)