Here I am at the end of October.  This is the month I tell people shows why Ohio is a great place to live… The fall colors are great!  Living in the woods means I get to see a lot of color, and this year is one of the best recent years to do some leaf viewing.

October is also really busy for us.  It’s great weather to be out, so we do a lot.  Every weekend seems to fill up, almost too much.  Luckily, we have a couple of weekends to relax between now and the holidays starting.  It’s also been a tough October for me, with Woody gone.  He always liked the turn in weather, and I just have great memories of spending time with him at this time of the year.  If anyone reading this has a dog, especially a lab, make sure to spoil them a little extra for me this week!

For us, the month of October was BUSY, and looked like this:

The Sauerkraut Festival in Waynesville was the middle weekend of the month, and we cooked over 800 lbs of pork.  We probably only sold about 500 lbs., so we overbought.  Next year, we’ll probably do about 600 lbs, and see how it goes, as I think we’ll get some return customers and some new ones.  People know about us now, and it will be easier to sell next year, I think.  With the extra meat, Mark and I each took some home, but we gave the rest to Eric, the guy that owns the hamburger wagon.  We’d made back our money plus a little, and we wanted to bless him with the extra in case he could sell it to help make back some money.

The festival had GREAT weather; overnight, the temps dipped to around freezing, but during the day on Saturday, it was sunny and in the high 50’s, and on Sunday it was partly sunny and in the low 60’s.  The turn out was a record 342,000 people! (The photo on the left shows our smoker with over 400 lbs of pork on it!)

The weekend after the Sauerkraut Festival was the Ohio Smoked Meat & BBQ Festival in Nelsonville, Ohio, which I’ve already ‘reported’ on.  We’re very happy with a placement in ribs there, but we want to do better overall next time!  We’ll be competing again next May, but prior to that, we’ll be doing a lot of practice, and hopefully still having a lot of fun with things!

This past weekend, we had our annual McAdams Wine Party.  We do this every year on the last weekend of October, and we usually invite more people than wine parties are "supposed" to have, but it’s all to have fun and try something new.  I’ll do an entry on the party, but suffice it to say for now that everyone had a good time.  Woody was honored at the start of the party, as we wouldn’t have had the party if he’d been with me still.  People brought a good variety of wines to try, and the food was pretty good.  This is the one party each year where I do all the food, and our guests supply wine only.

More on the party later, and the holiday season is coming up, which will bring a lot of turkey cooking, probably prime rib for Christmas, and maybe a suckling pig somewhere in between!