Well Played, January.

It is safe to say that January and I aren't friends.  It is notoriously slow for retail business, plus it just seems overly drawn out with the whole 31 day thing.  Plus, I noticed a trend in Square that Wednesdays this month have been our slowest day of the week as a rule.  So by early this morning, we sipped our coffee while considering the day ahead...

And as it turned out, we were busier than we could have expected (which probably means I shouldn't bother to troll Square history reports in my downtime).  Being busy is great, but it bumped our major plan for the day:  trying at least eight new recipes for tomorrow's Epic Pie Tasting Event.

Epic Pie Tasting is one of our favorite events to host (and also one of the most popular...tomorrow's event sold out in under an hour).  We choose 10 pies from our menu and five new pie recipes and bake them all to share with 18 new friends.  On occasion, Jeanne or I read a recipe in a magazine that sounds compelling and then other times, Jeanne looks through her collection of vintage cookbooks for ideas for new pie.  But today, we decided to go straight to the belly of the beast:  Pinterest.

Look up "pie" on Pinterest and prepare to be overwhelmed.  (Honestly, look up anything on Pinterest and be prepared to be overwhelmed.  I looked up "chicken breast" yesterday and broke out into a terror sweat at all the options.  Also, someone at Pinterest needs to add a filter function on there so you can search for "chicken" but filter out "crockpot".  Seriously.  But I digress.)

So, there we were...a busy PJP Buttonwood, yet looking at Pinterest together.  And oh, we have vastly different philosophies about Pinterest.  I'm more of a "like it, pin it, visit it later" approach.  Jeanne is more of a "like it, click it, and follow it to the very ends of the Internet" approach...or at least to the nearest broken link, wherein she will be indignant that the Internet is unable to produce someone's blog post from 2007 so she can look at a recipe that she would likely change in the end regardless.

Hours or so later, we finally agreed on five recipes that looked interesting enough to tweak to PJP standards for tomorrow night's menu.  And then Jeanne went to Hy-Vee to purchase a list of random supplies - maraschino cherries and molasses to start with - so we could test it all out.

Right after she came back and we drew up a plan, PJP Buttonwood got super busy.  As in, regular Wednesday busy...not January Wednesday busy.  We sold out of almost all pie, so we put our aprons back on and started on our baking schedule for the second time in the day.  It was a total December move.

Which is just the long story behind why we will start baking early in the morning.  And perhaps legitimately need to sample maraschino cherries before sunrise.

Well played, January.