Counting down the days....

What are some of my favorite things in this world?
Family.
Food.
Bumming around the house being lazy.

Yea, Thanksgiving is totally my kind of holiday. I am 95% excited 5% nervous to host Thanksgiving for the first time. My parents and brother are coming down and since I just happen to have the coolest family around I know that even if I make instant mashed potatoes and have cranberry sauce from the can the world will in fact not implode and what matters is that we get be together for few days.

I called my mom (the knower of all things food/entertaining) to ask some questions and the conversation sounded like this:

Me: So I'm driving to the grocery store right now, is there anything I can buy now for next week
Mom: Well, that depends on what you have on the menu
Me: Ummmm....well the menu is thanksgiving-y food
Mom: *pause* (I imagine this pause was spend with her imagining our Thanksgiving disaster that we were so clearly going to have on our hands, but then she does what I admire so much in her- be helpful w/o any kind of condescension in such a gentle way)
That might be something you want to do so you know what to buy
Me: Okay, I guess I should probably start on that then...

That is a snippets of my cluelessness and hopefully not an indicator of things to come. Andy and I are big nerds and did have a Friday night date of going to the grocery store to get a few things, including the main event....



Our 20 pound turkey! Okay, it's 19.88 pounds, but it was the biggest one we could find and a 20 pound turkey sounds so much better than a 19.88 pound turkey. We got Big Bertha for $6.50 too, man oh man there are some good sales this time of year. If I had more freezer room I would definitely buy a few more. I have appointed Andy in charge of that beast of a bird so I'm sure it will turn out great.

So that's what makes me happy this week, dreaming of hanging out with my favorite people in the world eating lots of (hopefully good) food!

Happy Birthday dear Andy!

My sweet husband had a birthday this weekend- 28 years of awesomeness on this earth. Woo-hoo! So we did what we did best, ate lots of good food (is that sad that that's what we do best?)

Barbeque at Rudy's for lunch


Fajitas at Texican for dinner (we felt like such big ballers going out to eat twice in one day!)


I try to ignore the fact that's Andy love of donuts is equal if not exceeding his love for me, the truth hurts- the man loves his donuts ;)

The birthday boy with his birthday loot


So after flipping through the pictures I asked Andy what's up with all the thumbs up and we says "When life is perfect it's impossible to not have two thumbs up". Awwwww...that's my Andy. Happy birthday my love- I am so proud to be your wife and hope you had a good birthday!

Crazy Aggies

On Saturday our sweet friends the Morrows called us up and invited us to the A&M OU game in College Station. We jumped at the chance and even though we aren't much into sports, knew it would be a good game and cool experience. Well it sure was. OU was favored to win, but A&M won! It was a good game and I'm glad they won because, well, those Aggies are kinda crazy ;) So many little phrases and traditions and I had no idea what they were saying a lot of the time but really cool to see thousands of people so passionate about their school.

Brave or dumb to wear our OU shirt with 80,000 Aggies?





Thanks Ryan and Elana for an awesome night! We had so much fun!

I pull the what out of the what?

I love soup. Not like- love. I knew with the cooler weather finally coming there was going to be some serious soup action in the kitchen. So, I decided to make chicken broth since it is way cheaper, healthier, and yummier to make from scratch. Every time I've made it has been with my mom and she does the "eww-ky" parts. I've been in "treatment" for my fear/disgust of raw meat for years now. My mom and Andy are sweet and always cooked meat for me in college so I would have little containers of ground beef or diced chicken in my freezer-I know right? How nice are they and how spoiled was I? So slowly I started cooking meat, I would use use those huge yellow dish gloves and disinfect everything like 4 times afterwards, but hey...better safe than sorry right? So, needless to say, I was intimidated about this. So instead of attempting to capture this traumatizing experience in words, which I couldn't not do the disgustingness of it justice, I took a few pictures along the way..

Cute little chicken all wrapped up in their plastic

At this point I was gross out, wondering exactly what I was about to stick my hand into....


As I have my hand inside the chicken I start imagining something chopping down on my hand and get myself even more freaked out. Then when I pull out God-only-knows what and it's this brown color that I was totally not expecting I screamed. The girl who get annoyed when people screams- screamed. Yeah, how lame am I? But look how gross that junk I pulled out is! UGH.

Ahhhhh.....in the pot, where it belongs, not on my counters or worse, around my wrist...

So I even though the gross part was over, picking all the chicken off the bone was kinda gross too, but again, I'm a weenie.

So after I got all the meat off, I threw the carcass back in to cook for a few more hours. PS. The word carcass should never be used in cooking. Blech.

So then it sat in the fridge for a day or so all the fat could solidify at the top and I could scrape it off. Again, gross.

Yea! All the stomach turning icky moments are worth when I got myself 24 cups of grade A broth! What what! Look out soup pot- you are about to get some serious use!

Date Night!

We were long past due for a date night. We do lots of fun stuff for sure, but because of all the awesomely fun people in our lives it is rare we go out by ourselves. So we declared a date night last Thursday.

We decided to hit up First Thursday, which is a really thing they do on South Congress the first Thursday (duh) of every month where all the cool little eclectic shops stay open late, lots of live music, local vendors selling everything from way disturbing art to cowboy boots and everything in between. We walked around and got some really good eats!


What a cool/weird city we get to live in!

For dinner we went to hands-down, no doubt about it, best pizza in Austin- HOME SLICE. So flippin good that I didn't even mind the over hour wait to eat outside in the semi-cold.



To end the evening we went to Gordough's, which I've blogged about before here. Their donuts can only be described as heaven in your mouth. We had one with cake batter filling, fudge icing and a scoop of icecream on top (yes, a 2,000 calorie donut wasn't sufficient for our artery clogging quota for the day apparently)


I'm one happy girl here! Cute hubby+night on the town+ ginormous donut= bliss.

Obligatory pumpkin carving post

What's a Halloween weekend without carving pumpkins? Our fun, sweet friends Paul and Rachel came over to do some serious showing off with their mad carving skills...





Yeah, I didn't even take a picture of mine- it was shmugly and even worthy of a photo! Despite my carving inadequacies I love it and it was a fun night!

Team Jacob!

In a last minute scramble to come up with costumes for a party we were going to Saturday night, we decided to be Bella and Jacob from Twilight. Yes, I am a 27 year old Twi-hard. Yes, I know about 15 years too old but hey.... (yes, that was my best argument- "hey") So knowing that I am totally Team Jacob my sweet husband volunteered to be my werewolf best friend.
So with a few hours to get a costume together, we dyed an old undershirt with tea bags to attempt to get the flesh tone and ironed on some abs that I volunteered to find a good image of on the web ;) Tough way to spend an afternoon...

My sweet Andy







We had a fun night and then Sunday we had some friends over to play board games and hang out while we passed out candy. It was a pretty good Halloween and I think I may have finally satisfied my need for Reeses cups which I didn't think would ever happen. Ready to get back on a healthy eating track and I even got up early to take a long walk this morning at 6am! Crazy. Hope everyone had an awesome Halloween!!!!!