Sara participated in the Chicago Food Swap. You can read a recap here. The basic idea is, you show up with homemade food, everyone else shows up with homemade food, and you swap. You can basically bring anything, but the more desirable your trade is, the more you can dictate what you are going to get in return. So there is some incentive to come up with something interesting, or unique.

For her swap, Sara brought:

• 6 half-pints of honey apple butter
• 4 half-pints homemade ketchup
• 2 pints of tomatoes from the garden

And in return she received this:

For those of you who can’t make out the labels, that is:

• full sized Spinach Gruyere quiche
• ~2 cups hot nuts
• half-pint pickled fennel
• half-pint cranberry sauce
• half-pint tomato jalapeno peach jam
• half-pint pear ginger jam
• half-pint autumn apple-cran jam
• half-pint whole cranberry jam
• half-pint ginger spice syrup
• pint sweet potato bisque w/ brown butter croutons
• s’mores kit w/ homemade marshmallows and homemade graham crackers
• small loaf of savory monkey bread w/ bacon, caramelized onions  & Gruyere

In other words, a pretty good haul!

The apple butter was a big hit (a whole quiche for a half-pint of apple butter??), which was kind of nice to hear. It’s fantastic to take something we have a lot of already, and trade it for a lot of interesting things that we can try. I think Sara is already making plans for what she wants to bring to the next one.

So far I can vouch for the quiche, soup, monkey bread, hot nuts, cranberry sauce, and the s’mores kit. You can guess which one the kids were most excited about.

I was actually surprised at how excited Evie was about the whole thing. She was dancing around excited, unable to wait as Sara pulled each new treasure from the box. This is a girl who does *not* like to try new things!

(I suppose I should say, she does not like to try new non-dessert things.)