Hi!

Things have been a little quiet over here lately, but don’t worry we are definitely still up to random shenanigans!

Steve and I retreated to a cabin outside of Asheville (on the top of a mountain) for the Thanksgiving holiday this year. While we love our families, we realized that we have never really taken a vacation that didn’t involve visiting someone! Thus, a total retreat with just us and the dogs was exactly what the doctor ordered after this difficult semester.

We decided to drive up on Wednesday morning and it was only a 4 hr drive from Raleigh (it was so different having a short trip for once!). Once we made it to Weaverville (just 10 min north of Asheville) we left my car at the bottom of the mountain and the owners were kind enough to drive us up the mountain to our cabin. They definitely were not kidding about needing 4 wheel drive!

The view was worth all the trouble though. It was simply breathtaking. We spent SO much time just looking. Not doing anything, just looking out and feeling peaceful 🙂

The inside of the cabin was pretty small, we had a bedroom, bathroom, and 1/2 a kitchen, and you could walk outside to get to the living room with a TV and couches. It couldn’t have been more perfect for us! We spent most of our time outside with the dogs and we made some pretty incredible meals using only an electric burner and a grill. Including our Thanksgiving dinner, Thanksgiving Turkey Burger!

This was so good, so imma go ahead and share the recipe:

Thanksgiving in a Burger

Ingredients:

• 1 lb ground turkey
• 0.25 cup chopped onion
• 0.25 cup dried cranberries
• 2-3 sprigs fresh rosemary, chopped
• ~0.5 cup bread crumbs (add enough so turkey is not super sticky)
• 2-3 sprigs fresh sage, chopped
• brie
• turkey gravy (homemade would be awesome but we just used the cheap instant stuff)
• buns

Directions:

It’s always a good idea to preheat your grill before you start so go ahead and do that, or oven or skillet or sidewalk, whatever you’re gonna use to cook the burgers.

Next, mix the turkey, onion, cranberries, bread crumbs, rosemary, and sage together in a bowl. Salt and pepper to taste and form into patties. Cook the patties until the burgers are cooked through then add a few slices (or a lot of slices because cheese) of brie and let it melt.

While the brie is melting, pour the instant gravy into the pot and add half of the water called for on the package. Cook according to package instructions and let thicken. <- This is gonna seem super salty, but it balances nicely with the whole burger deal.

BURGERS ASSEMBLE!! (at this point you can either attempt to call the Avengers or just assemble the burgers)

These were awesome and we regretfully only made 4. All of which were eaten within several hours of each other.

The dogs tried their best to get some, but were denied turkey this year

-Look at those bat ears!!!

After stuffing ourselves we went back to the usual activities and sat, drank wine, and looked at mountains…

See ya later with Thanksgiving Part 2!

For all the students out there, we’ve almost made it! The end of the semester is nigh! The only things between us and fleeting freedom is exams, exams, class projects, group projects, and exams <–note the sarcasm here, I’m not actually excited about any of these things

It’s the week of US Thanksgiving (aka The week where everyone seriously questions our sanity as we give thanks and then go kill each other for a TV that’s $50 off). I suppose Thanksgiving week is shorter.

Steven, the dogs and I are foregoing any long drives this year in favor of retreating to a cabin outside Asheville.

Tell me you aren’t relaxed looking at those views. But these are what we’ll be able to see from our cabin!

We are SO excited to get away from everything to completely unwind for a few days.

On a side note, Steve and I had a rather intense round of darts this past weekend and I foresee a rematch in the near future

We’ll be sure to post some pics of the Biltmore house dressed up for Christmas and of the mountain views and of the crazy bat (Luna) enjoying the mountain views

Have a safe and happy week!

So if you haven’t noticed yet, 

a new menu has popped up riiiight about there..

See it? It’s the one entitled, Highlight Reel or for those that can’t read, it’s the one on the far right.

We’ve decided that writing a long post with pictures about every day is actually a lot and we don’t take that many pictures.  This results in the blog not getting updated on a schedule and stuff like that.

SO

Enter Highlight Reel. It’s a place where we jot down a sentence, or two, about each day. Maybe even include a picture if we actually did something exciting (not likely, we are poor grad students and exciting things cost money).  This is mostly for us since we have the attention span and short term memory ability of a goldfish and we’d like to actually remember what we did or did not do.

Anywho, it’s definitely still super new so expect the page to look different every time you go there for a little while

TTYL