Pie Fest!

We have some very dear friends, who are almost like family.  We feel like their kids are almost our own, and they feel the same about ours, I think.  The husband in this family is an educated and ordained pastor who officiated over our summer family baptism under the stars.  He doesn't pastor as a vocation any longer, and more recently had a carpet-laying business, so installed all of our carpet and vinyl when we built our house.  I 'paid' him by making him pie, which he loves.  He actually posted a sign outside our front door while he worked, saying "Will work for Pie."                                                                                                                                                                                                    
On his longest work day, I made 3 kinds of pie.  He had a piece before starting work, a piece for 'morning pie break', a couple pieces for dessert after lunch, and another piece before hitting the road...The man loves his pie, and I love making them, especially for such an appreciative audience.  Ever since then, anytime we'd invite their whole family (up to 9 people) over for a meal, I would of course, always make a couple of kinds of pie, and somewhere along the line, each of these events became designated as "Pie Fest."                                                                                                                                                                 
With today's event in mind, I ordered a 20 pound bag of Meyer lemons from Wildly Organic this past week for Lemon Meringue Pie.  

2004 - Age 9 1/2

Prince Inventive became quite the Lime or Lemon Meringue Pie aficionado at a fairly young age, so I enlisted his help with those.                              

Last night - Age 16 1/2

Since I considered this close enough to the date, I'd hope to also have Cherry Pie, which, when we were kids, my mom often made in honor of George Washington's birthday.  But I had trouble finding cherries, and refused to buy the ready-made, full-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup cherry pie filling, so had to come up with another idea.  I bought some Granny Smith apples instead, and with help from my peelers and slicers, we made Apple-Cranberry Pies with crumbled tops.     

A surprise visit from family members yesterday made for a lovely evening of visiting, but delayed our pie baking.  We had a late, but fun night, baking pies until 1 AM.  I hope we don't yawn at our guests!