I've been helping plan our Thanksgiving menu for this year. We're having brisket, gravy, mashed potatoes, green beans with bacon, cranberry jello salad, and sourdough bread. Tomorrow I'll fry the bacon for the green beans, start the brisket, and bake the pies with my sisters. Currently planning to make eggnog pumpkin pie, butterscotch pecan pie, and probably a berry pie.  

I started making Christmas cookies to send to the grandparents. My sister made peppernuts and I made Danish butter cookies. I hadn't made Danish butter cookies before, so I wanted to try them. They were pretty good, but I think I prefer spritz cookies. Also I broke one of my last decorating bags attempting to pipe the cookies , so I think I'll go back to my recipes that use the cookie press. 

Your Thanksgiving spread sounds delicious, @SnowAngel! How did the pie baking go?
I know that my grandparents made spritz cookies at one point in time, but I don't think I've ever actually made them. We had a kit for it at one point - wonder if we still have it somewhere.  

My Thanksgiving cooking is looking a lot different this year, but I made some rolls today and am planning on making a potato dish tomorrow. I'll probably also make an apple pie, but am unsure if it'll happen tomorrow or Friday for a later celebration.

Wow, @SnowAngel, you've been cooking up a storm! That all sounds delicious! Especially the eggnog pumpkin pie - I've never heard of that but yum!!

@valiantarcher I could do with a roll myself about now... Those also sound delicious! ^^

My contribution to our smaller early Thanksgiving this year was my mom's long-time favorite "Thanksgiving Breakfast" which is a cross between bread pudding and French toast, with a nice thick brown sugar and cinnamon topping. It was a very nostalgic and easy dessert choice which will probably be repeated.

Posted by: @snowangel

green beans with bacon,

This sounds similar to a recipe I discovered last year, "Green Beans and Potatoes with Bacon":

1 pound green beans, trimmed and cut into bite-sized pieces

4 cups baby potatoes, diced

1 onion, diced; 2 cloves garlic, minced

1 tsp bagel seasoning mix or steak seasoning mix (I use the latter, usually)

1 cup chicken broth

1/2 tsp dried thyme; 1/2 tsp dried rosemary

Salt and pepper to taste (we are not big salt people, but always add a good dose of freshly ground pepper)

2 Tblsp olive oil

Sooooo tasty!

The Thanksgiving dishes sound scrumptious, Snow Angel, Valia, and Adeona.  

I hope you each are having a very special weekend. Our Canadian Thanksgiving seems ages ago now. (Second weekend of October.)

Our Thanksgiving food turned out great. I miss judged the cooking time on the green beans and had to move them from the crockpot to the stove top and then back again for serving. Other than that, it came together really well. I made two batches of mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving Day, so there would be plenty and there was. We enjoyed the generous amount of leftover mashed poatoes on shepherd's pie a couple days later.

The eggnog pumpkin pie was a hit, voted best baked pumpkin pie ever by everyone. I used this recipe from Taste of Home. Highly recommend, I made the eggnog using my great-grandma's recipe plus a little bit of cream.  

My sisters and I got a little carried away baking pies and made five, but we did plan to have four. Three pies were for Thanksgiving Day and one was for the night before. It turned out that we had enough crust for five pies and we have five glass pie dishes, so we used them all.   Our only problem was trying to time the pie crusts and fillings right for the oven, we made 1 pie that baked 375F, 2 pies at 400F, and 2 blind baked crusts at 450F plus the meringue on the butterscotch pecan baked at 350F. So, even with having a pie and half that evening and then extra company on Thanksgiving we still had leftover pie for Friday to go with decorating for Christmas.  

@valiantarcher, I love love love making spritz cookies, all that butter is so good. I made a batch of vanilla and used the Christmas tree shape on the cookie press to make them festive to send to my grandparents in the Christmas box last week. One thing I've learned baking them over the years is they are usually better a bit overbaked than under baked, overly golden and crispy is better than soft with this recipe. I found a cream cheese spritz cookie recipe in a Christmas cookie cookbook over the weekend, so I think I might have to try it soon.  

@adeona, oh, that sounds delicious. I love French toast casserole unlike some of my poor siblings, I have a recipe that has a cream cheese/cream mixture in it and it's a great holiday breakfast.  

Oh, that sounds yummy, @jo, I'll have to put on my list of recipes to try.  

@Adeona, that sounds like a delicious breakfast casserole!

@Jo, can I come over the next time you make your green bean and potato dish?

Hurrah for the extra mashed potatoes, @SnowAngel! And too many pies, what a problem... They all sound delicious!
Yum on the spritz cookies, too! Have you tried the cream cheese variant yet?

I did not actually end up making the apple pie in the end for Thanksgiving. People liked the rolls (I think they were slightly underdone/not the best myself, but was glad people liked them) and loved the potatoes - I made a second batch for a fellowship lunch the following Sunday.

As far as Christmas cooking goes, I've made some pizzelles to give away (and will be making more for the same purposes) and I've committed to making some other cookies with my mom to give away. I'd like to do some baking for us ourselves, but am not sure when we'll get to it.

Posted by: @valiantarcher

Yum on the spritz cookies, too! Have you tried the cream cheese variant yet?

It's still on my list to bake, I ran out of white flour, so I'm debating whether or not I should try them with whole wheat. I would like to make for Christmas Day since my brother requested we have lots of cookies for dessert. So I will have to make a decision on trying them with whole wheat pretty quick here.

Yum, I need to make rolls...seems like a long time since I last made them. I think I might have to make some for Christmas, not sure my sister-in-law wants to make the bread this year.

This week I tried a recipe for scalloped potatoes in the crockpot, normally we make them in the oven, but the large glass pan just doesn't quite cut it for our crowd anymore and it often overflows in the oven making a nasty mess. So I'm going to try to make the cheesy potatoes for Christmas, but in the crockpot instead of the oven. I was mostly pleased with the new recipe I tried, but I think for Christmas we will mix recipes and I will make my favorite cheese sauce for the potatoes.

@SnowAngel, did you end up trying the spritz cookies again for Christmas? And the scalloped potatoes, or did you decide to push that off until later?

 I did indeed make some more pizzelles, as well as the cookies I committed to. Still have not got to that us-only baking, and I'm guessing it won't end up happening for a little while at this rate.

@valiantarcher, I did make the cream cheese spritz cookie recipe with whole wheat flour for Christmas Day, and while I liked the flavor it didn't really seem like a spritz cookie. The texture was more like a sugar cookie, tasty, but not the butter cookie I was hoping it would be. So I would like to make the regular spritz recipe again soonish. We completely ran out of butter from all the cookie baking before it was butter pickup day again. And now I'm waiting for it to be my turn to bake again.  

Cheesy potatoes are still in the future somewhere. We had to change the Christmas Day menu, so now we have to get schedules to align again. We're thinking we might have brisket and cheesy potatoes next Sunday if we can get everyone together, we were trying for New Year's Day, but that didn't work out.

What's on your "us-only baking" list?

Ah, interesting about the cream cheese spritz cookies, @SnowAngel! But that makes sense that they would come out more sugar cookie than butter cookie. I hope you're able to make some more regular spritz cookies soon!
Cheesy potatoes in the future sounds like a good thing. Hope it works out for Sunday.
Good question about the "only us" baking. I don't have any solid must-bakes (which might be part of the problem ) but I have vague ideas of it being far too long since we've had balloon buns (cinnamon-type rolls with marshmallow centers), peanut butter twisters (kind of like cinnamon rolls but with a peanut butter filling and chocolate icing), pull-apart, and cardamom rolls. All of those tend to be rather involved, so the odds of making more than one at a time are low.

So today ended up being my somewhat once in a blue moon reorganizing of our pantry and dry goods area because my parents have been randomly going into the grocery store and coming home and just shoving things into the pantry. 

I also decided to make salsa from scratch (thank you @fantasia for the recipe). We had a tomato plant that decided to hang on and give us like 9 small tomatoes last week. So I only used two roma tomatoes. They were starting to show their age so I wanted to do something with them. I forgot the hatch chilies and it was a bit runny at first, so I reduced it by simmering for a few minutes and it came out good. Dad is picky in his salsa and he didn't like one spice. Mom and I liked it.

Then I got to use the new to me KitchenAid mixer I got for Christmas and made a cake. 

My goal for this year is to learn to cook gluten free bread and desserts as I've got family who are supposed to be gluten free and I may get told to go that way too because of an under active thyroid.