Welcome to Full Plate Thursday and the Top Ten features from last weeks party! I sure hope that all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with lots of wonderful food and fellowship with family and friends. Now we are all ready to move on to the Christmas and Hanukkah season, one of my favorite times of the year. Come on in and get you a cup of hot cocoa and a cookie, there is plenty of room to warm up by the fire. I love Thursday because I know that you will soon be here with your fantastic inspirations!

Cookies and Christmas just go together and what more fun at Christmas and Hanukkah than a great Cookie Exchange Party with your friends. We have a fabulous blogging community here with some of the greatest cooks on the planet. I am looking forward to the awesome collection of cookies that we will have here. At the end of the party I hope we have some fabulous cookie recipes to take home that we can enjoy for years to come! Thanks so much for bringing your cookie recipes to share with us, we will cherish the love that has gone into everyone of your recipes!

There are pecan orchard's and pecan trees all around us and in the fall of the year when pecan harvest is going on there are plenty of pecans for everyone including the little squirrels. A favorite southern treat is a praline, so for this recipe I am combining a nice spice cookie with a praline topping making this a very special cookie! This cookie is crisp on the outside and soft on the inside topped with fresh pecans from East Texas, just delicious!

We had a fantastic Thanksgiving with lots of wonderful food and fellowship with family and friends. It is really winter time cold here, I think we must have skipped most of fall, so we are on to warm cozy foods to fill our meal plan for the week. I am off to the pantry, then the barn to see what supplies have been depleted after Thanksgiving. I always check my inventories before I start planning meals, it just make's my life easier and we all like to have life a little easier. I can see some Slow Cooker recipes coming up next week.

Welcome to our special Thanksgiving Edition of Full Plate Thursday! The cottage is very busy this week as we prepare for friends and family to sit around the Thanksgiving table and enjoy great food and fellowship. That is exactly why we are having an early Thanksgiving with all of our blog friends. We have some awesome features today and I really can't wait to see what you will be bringing to share with us this week, you'al are the greatest! Thank you so much for being a part of Full Plate Thursday and being a part of this community! Wishing You and Your Family An Abundant Thanksgiving Filled With Special Blessings, Love and Joy!

My original recipe for this dessert is very old and the card is yellowed, we have made it for many years. Some of my friends make a recipe that is very similar and they call their recipe a salad, but to us it has always been dessert. It has layer's of flavors starting with a salty base then a creamy sweet layer and ending with a tart cranberry topping. This is a great dessert to serve anytime but is especially great for holiday meals and events. Take it to your covered dish dinners, luncheons, and then it is perfect for that special family gathering.

The cottage is buzzing this week, we are preparing for Thanksgiving, with the wonderful food, family, friends and an opportunity to enjoy the harvest of our lives. For several weeks now I have been making sure that my pantry will be fully stocked with the staples that we will need to get the meals prepared for the number of folks that we will have here this week. I am so excited to be able to enjoy cooking the meal and not worry about what to cook, because we have our meal plan. When We Sit At Our Thanksgiving Table Please Know That I Count Each Of You Among My Many Blessings May God Bless You Abundantly

Oh my goodness, come in the cottage and warm up by the fire, winter has arrived! We are going to have many wonderful recipes on the table today that will bring you cozy comfort during this cold weather. We had a great party last week and are featuring some of your most popular post from that party. Be sure and check out the NOTICE OF CHANGE For Thanksgiving week here at the cottage and for this party. I can't wait to see all of you today so lets get the party started!

The men and most of the women in our family love a great potato dish. We have made a number of different potato recipes in my day, and this is one that they all love. It is a very special recipe with herb infused cream and very creamy potatoes that just melt in your mouth. This is a potato recipe that I make for very special occasions and very rarely have a left over. It has gone to church dinners, ladies covered dish events, and football banquets. It is a great recipe for a family gathering of any kind.

We are sweet potato lovers and this is a great cake recipe that we really enjoy here at the cottage. Sweet potatoes are one of the crops that farmers produce in this area, so we are blessed with wonderful fresh sweet potatoes. This is a very special cake recipe that was developed and served for a special party for one of our Grandchildren and that's when it became, Nana's Sweet Potato Cake. This cake is so easy to put together and is full of warm cozy flavors, and is often time's requested from friends and family. Very moist and it is almost like a pie, we like to top it with a nice dollop of ice cream and a drizzle of caramel!

We are planning a very special meal for the Veterans in our family to honor them in some small way for the service that they have given to our country. We have had so much rain here and it is very cold, so all of our activities will be indoors this week. I am preparing for the Thanksgiving Feast meal plan and beginning to put together some staples that will be needed for that meal, planning ahead always helps. I am going to sip on some wonderful Spiced Cider while we put together this meal plan for the week.

Welcome To Full Plate Thursday When you come to the country and down the country roads to get to the cottage, you will find that fall is surrounding us with beautiful color, a chill in the air and I am so happy to see you! We will have some hot cider for you to sit by the fire and enjoy the fellowship with all our friends that gather here every Thursday! The recipes, thanksgiving ideas, fall decor, all so special this time of the year. Our party links are the best in  blogger land and we feature some of them every week, which I hope you will go by and visit these awesome blogs. I am getting so excited to see what all of you will be sharing with us today, so lets get busy and get this party started!

We love roasted vegetable combinations that are so full of flavor. When we are serving a crowd or just a simple family dinner, this is a very simple but delicious way of preparing a great side dish. For this dish we are going to the garden to harvest some of our home grown butternut squash, it has a very rich flavor when roasted. We are mixing some Brussels Sprouts, Cranberries and great seasons to make this a favorite for the season!

When the holidays would be close, my Grandfather would begin to gather the pumpkins from the field and bring them up to the house. My Grandmother would cut the pumpkins, take the seeds out to clean and dry, then she would roast the meat of the pumpkin. I remember getting to help carve one of the pumpkins, with a funny mouth before it was roasted. There is a very rich smell that fills the kitchen with the roasting pumpkin in the wood stove oven. The pumpkin meat was cooled then she would mash it up and next was the pie. Much later when that pie came out of the oven it was amazing, I can still smell it and almost taste it. I am so grateful to have my Grandmothers recipe for that pie, so that I can re create those memories and share them with family and friends. 

Welcome November and it came in with a bucket of rain at the cottage. It is cold rainy and fall has arrived, definitely time for cozy fall meal plans. I am having fun looking at recipes, checking the pantry and making the plan, hope I don't have to get out in the rain to go to the market. This week I may be able to make the meal plan without having to go to the market, that would be great and what a great time of the year to save a little money for the holidays that will be coming up. Now I have challenged myself to cook from the pantry this week so lets see what we can do, I love a challenge!