It's all about the pies...

This morning was the second annual pie sale at our church. It is a fundraiser for our local crisis center. Since I'm on the committee, I ended up being co-leader of this event. Since I13 needs to do a community service project for school (I personally think this is GREAT!) he asked his teacher if baking pies and helping at the sale would count as his 4 hours of community service. Of course, it did. Hurrah!

But we decided to do something a bit different this year. Since the sale starts at 9 am, we decided to do a breakfast theme and make quiche. I13 has helped make this before so I got him up early this morning to help.

Learning to flute pastry. Not as simple as it looks...

We made three quiches, which I'm happy to report sold out quickly. And as a bonus, they were from local ingredients (well, except for the cheese)

Broccoli/cheese and Southwestern quiche.

One quiche was a broccoli one made with some of the broccoli that I froze earlier this year. Yum. It was the first to be sold out. The other two were Southwestern inspired with jalapeno peppers, onions and sweet corn, mixed with cheddar cheese. Eggs were from Kalona and milk from the local dairy. Mmmm... I was a bit surprised at the number of comments I got about the ones with the corn in them. I guess lots of people never considered putting corn into a quiche and thought it was inspired. Um.... Ok.... I didn't think it was THAT inspired. I had several people ask for the recipe and I had to be honest and tell them that there isn't one- we just threw them together.

I13 dishes up a piece of pie for a hungry customer.

The guy in the background is Michael K. He was the other person helping. He happens to be the food writer of the local paper. I find it kind of funny that he was amazed as well that I didn't use a recipe. He evidently uses a recipe for everything. I know that lots of people cook that way but it just seems alien to me to have to use a recipe every time you cook. I probably wouldn't cook as much if that was the case.

All in all, we made over $400 for the crisis center, so it was a productive morning.

In a totally different note- Please send good thoughts to Colorado. Another wildfire broke out this morning, only a few miles from my sister's home. They are now talking about possible evacuations in Big Thompson Canyon where we celebrated J16's birthday this May. Fortunately, the winds are pushing the fire away from my sister's house but it can't be good.