Hi Friends! It’s the Tasty Tuesday before Thanksgiving,and that may mean you are busy lining up groceries and tablecloths and extra folding chairs so everyone has a seat at the table! What a lovely holiday Thanksgiving is! A time to truly be thankful for all we’ve been blessed with!

So for this week, I have pulled some lovely recipes from the past, that have gotten rave reviews, to offer you a few more options for all of your upcoming holiday gatherings! I promise they are easy and taste fantastic, just the way I like them!

I will share a few pictures and the link to the recipes below. Some of these pictures were taken by my dear friend Maribeth Schmidt. Maribeth is so talented! She has helped me out so much over the years! Thank you, Maribeth!

The first thing I wanted to share with you are the dinner rolls we prepare for our holiday dinners. They are so easy and so much better than the rolls that are already baked. They literally fly out of the pan at our gatherings!

Don’t they look tasty? They are so easy! It all starts with Rhodes Frozen Dinner Rolls.

The whole trick with these is allowing enough time for the bread rolls to thaw and rise. I shared these in a recipe a few months ago for Beef Stew.

For the Dinner Roll recipe, please click here: Easy Beef Stew and Dinner Rolls

Next I wanted to share a recipe for a sweet and creamy fruit salad.

It is similar to a Waldorf Salad. Loaded with apples and nuts and all kinds of fruit, this is perfect for the holiday season!

If you would like this recipe, you can find it here: Dreamy Creamy Fruit Salad

I also wanted to share a lovely vegetable side dish, far and away my number one requested dish at family gatherings: Savory Green Bean Casserole, also known as… the Gutbuster!

It’s so velvety and cheesy, buttery and rich. It is the Cadillac of cheesy bean casseroles!

I guarantee this will be a hit!

If you would like to try this recipe, click here: The Gutbuster: Green Bean Casserole

And finally, I wanted to share a very popular dessert recipe for Pumpkin Crunch.

This is such an easy and exquisitely delicious dessert!

My son Jake is not a huge fan of pumpkin pie, but he specifically asks for this one (twice in the last month!) It’s that good, especially warm from the oven with ice cream!

If you are interested in trying this dessert, you can find it here: Pumpkin Crunch

I think back to those holidays of my childhood, what a happy time!  The house was filled with family, the closet would be bursting with coats! There were cheery smiles and so much laughter! The ladies were busy putting the final touches on the dishes and platters in the kitchen, and clouds of steam from the stove top billowed. I remember how beautiful all of the women in the family were to me! My mom, Aunt Linda, Aunt Mary and Grandma all so pretty! Even more pretty because when they looked at you, you could see the love they had in their eyes for you!

The kids would be running upstairs and downstairs, laughing and thrilled to see their cousins again! Usually someone would sit down and play the piano. Aunt Blanche was always trying to keep an eye on her purse so she wouldn’t forget where she put it (I can relate to that issue myself now!). There were smiles on every single face! You couldn’t contain it!

My father would be called in to carve the turkey. I wonder if he ever felt nervous about carving it. He sure looked confident! He always brought a sense of humor to everything he did! My job was filling the ice water in glasses and putting them on the tables. It made me feel important to have a job! And when the potatoes were whipped and the salad was dressed and the dinner rolls were placed in the bread baskets, the calls to dinner would begin, “Its time!” “Come to the table!” We had tables (and people) everywhere! And there was always room for one more!

The house would gradually quiet to a hush as we paused and Uncle Al would give the blessing. I treasured that moment! That was the shining star, our hearts joined in a collective thanks to God to express what we all knew- we were blessed with such a tremendous gift of love in our family!  Even if there wasn’t a crumb in the cupboard, we had a feast of love!

And then the dinner kicked off! A cat or a dog strategically under the table. The smell of delicious food met with hungry tummies, and so many wonderful comfort foods on one plate! And is there any place better in the whole world than sitting at the kid table? Oh I am smiling now thinking back to how precious those memories are to me! I’m so thankful for every person who sat at those tables! For my cousins who made me laugh! For the kind faces of every aunt and uncle! For the love my parents and grandmother drenched us in. I was taking every drop of it in.

And the story continues, with a few faces now watching from Heaven, and a longing in my heart to see them, but I know we will be together again one day. And some new faces at the table, oh what a delight it is when God brings someone new to the family! We really have so much to be thankful for!

May we continue to create these memories forever!

I wish you more love and laughter than you could ever imagine this Thanksgiving! I am so thankful to get to share this part of our lives together!

Love Always,

Amy

Home is where love resides, memories are created, friends and family belong, and laughter never ends.          ~Unknown