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My favorite family dinner came a few days after Thanksgiving when my dad would take all the bits of leftover turkey and with vegetable and gravy additions, turn them into turkey pot pie with homemade crust. He would only make turkey pot pie once, maybe twice a winter so it was extra special each year. There wasn't a bad bite in the giant pan.

French bread rolls. It's a bit more work but the rolls are so decadent.

I was making my grandmothers mandelbrot for the first time and if you've ever tried to make it, you know how stiff the dough can get. Since the was years before I got my stand mixer I was mixing by hand. I started off using a wooden spoon but was not an experienced baker yet so I didn't think to switch to my hands when the dough got too dense. End result I broke the wooden spoon that my father had been using for over 20 years. Thankfully he didn't mind and the mandelbrot turned out great!

Well that happened two days ago when I cooked around 130 potato pancakes for a Hanukkah party! I've never cooked that much food for a party before and I was so pleased with how well they turned out and how big of a hit they were!

Penne with chicken or sausage (depending on what's in the freezer) and any veggies I have on hand then all coated in parmesan cheese!

Flavored breadsticks. I take a package of ready-to-cook breadsticks from the grocery and brush them with herbs and olive oil before cooking them off.

Roasted vegetables - even my vegetable-hating neighbor had seconds.

Oameal with butterscotch chips or chocolate chip with both milk and white chips. They're both so good it's hard to choose!

What we did with it depended on what it was. Non-freezable items like lettuce went to very happy neighbors. The 15 pounds of green beans in 3 weeks, I prepped, blanched, and froze. The swiss chard was the worst. That I just cooked and froze in 1 cup containers to use over the next few months. I recently learned it's great in turkey meatloaf. We're definitely doing our CSA again next year but I do need to get a chest freezer before then to help out.

I created a very decadent chocolate lavender tart - a classic tart crust filled with a layer of chocolate whipped cream with crushed lavender folded in, then topped with dark chocolate ganache. It was heavenly!

Definitely cole slaw - heavy on vinegar, light on the mayo. Yum!

A slice of dense chocolate cake (my favorite recipes of course) that's filled and coated with dark chocolate ganache with dark chocolate shaving all over it and a few raspberries on top. Yum!

On a family vacation to Williamsburg, VA many many summers ago, we ate twice at a tea room near the William and Mary campus. The first dinner I had a piece of their homemade chocolate cream pie for dessert. It was the perfect blend of ultra-chocolaty and mousse texture with a super flakey crust. It was so good that at dinner the second night, I had another piece and my brother had two pieces as his dinner! We refer to it as "The Two Pie Piece Meal" in my family now. I have yet to find another piece of chocolate cream pie that is that perfect!