imdrno, thank you for the pecan bars recipe. I am a pecan pie fanatic and I love the idea of being able to cut the bars into small/tiny servings and then freeze them. Adding making pecan bars to my list of things to do! Kathsgrdn, I think your menu is perfect and I wouldn't add or change anything except for offering another dessert. I love pumpkin pie but my hubby detests it. He's quite happy if an alternative such as apple or cherry pie is available, but he will also be perfectly satisfied with a brownie or cookies of the chocolate chip or oatmeal variety. I think you'd be perfectly fine to pick up another different type of pie or a dozen cookies from the bakery and call it done so that you don't have to do any additional work.

https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/article_9243bb74-ecfa-11e8-8f73-0f42fb5dada2.html "The Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank is filled these days with people volunteering their time and sorting food donated for the hungry. But what this 170,000-square foot facility on Choctaw Drive doesn't have as the holidays start is food. The situation has gotten bad enough that the charity, which serves an 11-parish area, is putting out public calls for extra help, for extra donations of food, and especially for money to purchase additional food. High-profile disasters, including hurricanes Florence and Michael, as well as the ongoing wildfires in California, have diverted the supply of donated food as well as drawn away cash donations that might ordinarily have gone to help hungry people locally at Thanksgiving and Christmas. “You would ordinarily see all of these shelves full,” said Mike Manning, pointing to two tall, long and nearly empty stretches of metal shelving at the rear of the facility. These shelves is where the the charity normally stores its dry, canned and staple foods. Manning, president and CEO of the Greater Baton Rouge Food Bank, said instead he is flush with candy, a relic of the Halloween holiday, pointing to a big box of M&M bags. “We’ve got a lot of candy,” Manning said. “That’s not what we need.” About 30 volunteers, several of them employees of ExxonMobil, were on hand Monday sorting donated canned food. Many people brought their families. The empty shelves are not visible from their work area. Katie Skiles volunteered on Monday with her father Joe and brother, James, but she said she has worked there by herself since she first volunteered more than a year ago. “My parents made me come,” Katie said. “Now I love it.” A senior at Lee High in Baton Rouge, Katie, 17, said she was not aware of the food shortage. She said she might talk to the National Honor Society at her high school about doing a food drive. The warehouse currently has about 1 million pound of food in its inventory, about half of the normal inventory, Manning said. One million pounds of food is also roughly what the food bank distributes each month to its 100-plus member agencies, he said. And to top it all off, this is normally a time of peak inventory, when the food banks stock up in order to have sufficient supply for the early months of the year. “I’ve never see it this bad going into the holidays,” Manning said. Besides recent disasters and the resulting “donor fatigue,” another food supply factor is the shrinking donations over time from commercial grocers who carry less excess inventory than they used to, Manning said. To help restock, the food bank has asked local schools to do special food drives. What would help most, though, are cash donations, which people can donate online on the charity’s website, Manning said. “We are kind of held hostage by the national situation, unless we can get sufficient money to purchase food,” he said. It doesn’t necessarily take much money to help. Manning pointed to palettes full of canned vegetables without labels on them. These cans, when they have commercial labels, cost 70 to 90 cents a can at the store, but without the labels, they cost the food bank between 5 and 10 cents a can. Manning said he’s talking about having a more formal fund drive around New Years to raise money, but he’s been too busy to pull together anything more formal sooner. “We’re in firefighting mode right now,” he said. “We’re just asking for help.”

That's too bad about your daughters friends. But it was very kind of you to send them plates. I feel like I end up working every holiday because someone else always either takes the week for vacation or calls in sick and I'm stuck covering for them. This year i will miss both my mom's and my sister's thanksgiving dinners because I am working. I work 12 hour shifts, and despite their insistence that I can get by with just an hour or so of sleep to come and spend the day with them,I don't go. Every year SO brings me a plate of food from his mom on thanksgiving and Christmas, and he will bring it to me at work. I might stop by my sister's house on my way to work,but I may not get up in time. My mom lives 45 minutes away,and won't budge on the day she is having hers in order to accommodate some of my other siblings,who have school age kids. So I won't be attending hers. Every time I take my car to a shop or even the dealership to have something fixed,i leave with something else broken. That is why SO is in charge if all auto repairs now.

Artemis_Ma, that sounds like the stuffing I make now that was my Mom's recipe. Here's my recipe: My Stuffing (or Dressing depending on your frame of mind) Growing up, our family always used to stuff the turkey. Thus, it was stuffing. However with all the concern about bacteria and under cooking, I started cooking it in a casserole dish. Thus, it is no longer stuffing, but dressing. Ingredients 16 cups of assorted mild flavored stale bread 1 onion, chopped fine 3 stalks of celery, chopped fine 1-16 oz tube of sausage (I like Jimmy Dean regular or sage) 2-4 cups chicken broth 6 oz sliced fresh button mushrooms 6 tablespoons butter Poultry seasoning (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, salt and pepper) Whenever I have ends of loaves of bread, or we don’t finish a loaf of bread, I’ll put them in a freezer bag and throw them in the freezer until I’m ready to make stuffing. You want to use mild breads (any white bread, hamburger or hot dog rolls, whole wheat, multi grain, sour dough, Italian, French, etc, work well. Breads that have a strong flavor like rye bread, pumpernickel, garlic bread, etc, will overwhelm the flavor of the stuffing. Don’t use these.) Toast bread in the toaster until golden brown. Tear bread into bite size pieces and put into a large bowl. In a large skillet, cook the sausage until no longer pink. Do not drain. Put sausage (grease and all) into bread bowl and crumb sausage. In the same skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of butter. Sauté onion until translucent. Add to bread and sausage (do not drain). In the same skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of butter. Sauté slice mushrooms until tender (until they start to sweat). Add to bread and sausage (do not drain). In the same skillet, melt 2 tablespoons of butter. Sauté celery until tender. Add to bread and sausage (do not drain). Heat the chicken broth (start with 2 cups) until boiling and pour over the bread and sausage mixture. Add two heaping tablespoons of poultry seasoning. Mix everything with your hands. The mixture should be moist but not soggy. If the mixture is still dry add a little more chicken broth. If stuffing the bird, stuff the bird and cook according to roasting directions for the bird. If making dressing, place the stuffing in a greased casserole dish (or two. I use two smaller casserole dishes. A 13x9 baking dish can usually accommodate it.) Bake covered at 350 degrees F for 1 hour.