Top 3 Thursday: Restaurants

This Thursday's Top 3 is our favorite restaurants of all time!

1) LA PARILLA! (Marietta, GA) If you read our blog often, you'll know how we mention La Parilla weekly :) We get the Burrito a la Parilla, steak cooked medium. They divide it into two plates and it's so much food for a grand total of $9.50 take out. A.M.A.Z.I.N.G. Their strawberry margaritas are heavenly too!


2) BLACK CAT! (Boone, NC) This one is probably Kyle's favorite of all time. He just loves it. It's also Mexican food, and the burritos and queso are to die for!
3) KANKI! (Raleigh, NC) This is probably the restaurant that I crave the most down here. I wish so much we had one in GA! It's Japanese food where they cook right in front of you and it is just delicious. The dipping sauces are so good!
And of course I had to cheat and add one more! (since it's not "technically" a restaurant!)
4) GOODBERRY'S! (Raleigh, NC) Their frozen custard (icecream) is the best I have ever had in my life, and we go every time we are in Raleigh. I get a vanilla concrete with heath bar. I literally have considered getting some delivered to our house in GA with dry ice... maybe one day!

So what are your top 3??

Book Club: The Last Song

Last Friday I hosted our book club at our house! We are all enjoying reading books and then going to see them in the movies, so we decided to go with another Nicholas Sparks book-- The Last Song. I had already read the book when it first came out, so I was ahead of the game :)
Everyone came over to our house around 7 and we ate dinner and talked until 9 or so. In the back of Nicholas Sparks books there are "book club questions" so that's nice to always discuss and learn more about each other that way.
The movie was hilarious... in a bad way. Miley Cyrus is the main actress and she just can't act at all. Normally I can get past that in these kind of movies, but I just couldn't.

Either way though her boyfriend in the movie is H.O.T!

Here we are making our Miley Cyrus expressions... attractive I know:

A great night as always, looking forward to next months!

Wordless Wednesday: It's a bird, It's a plane... It's TYSON!

(one more time! one more time!)

Pucky

Sunday night around 9:30 pm we headed upstairs to get ready for bed. Puck was doing his normal "hungry routine" of running back and forth between the laundry room (where they get fed) and our bedroom (to tell us he's hungry.) Almost every night I close him in our room for a couple minutes so I don't have to hear him constantly meowing. Well this time when I slammed the door to keep him in our room, he decided to try and run out. His tail got caught in the door, but he kept running. I can't even explain the feeling that I had when I opened the door and saw the pile of fur with a little piece of his tail in it...

We rushed to the emergency vet clinic about a mile away from our house and they took Puck back immediately to check his vitals. (What's crazy is that Puck didn't even get that his tail was hurt, he kept running back upstairs to beg for his dinner). We waited in the vet for over 2.5 hours before the doctor came to talk to us. She finally came in and told us that Puck needed surgery to cut off the exposed vertebrae, which in essence would make his tail about 2 inches shorter than it normally was. We gave her the green light, then headed home to get about 2 hours of sleep before we could pick him up.
Kyle let me sleep (I have a cold and took NyQuil before everything happened) while he picked up Puck around 2:15 am. The surgery went very well. When they got home I sat in our bathroom with Puck for a while. He was so drugged he kept running into everything, and those Elizabethan collars are just terrible. I finally couldn't fight the NyQuil anymore and went back to sleep for 30 minutes. The next 4 hours were spent getting out of bed every 30 minutes or so-- trying to calm down Puck and putting his Elizabethan collar back on.
I ended up staying home on Monday to make sure Puck was okay and didn't try to take off the bandage (I have completely given up on making him wear the collar). We go back to the vet Tuesday afternoon to get his bandage changed, and then in 10 days to get the stitches out. After everything he has been through and now this, he definitely wins the award for 'toughest cat'. You can't imagine how terrible I feel that this happened, just one of those freak accidents that we'll be sure never happens again...

Hashbrown Casserole!

This is one of the casseroles my family has been making every holiday for years! It's delicious, so I definitely have to share! Kyle and I made this for our Easter dinner this year.

Ingredients:
1 (32 oz) package frozen southern hash browns
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1/2 small chopped onion
1 can cream of chicken soup
1/2 cup melted butter
10 oz melted Velveeta
1 small carton of sour cream
2 cup crushed corn flakes

Instructions:
Defrost potatoes. Mix all ingredients together (except 1/4 of the butter).
Put into 13x9 pan. Top with corn flakes and 1/4 cup melted margarine drizzled over-top. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour. Delicious!

Girls Night!

I just realized my friend Amy has never made it on our blog... so I needed to change that ASAP! We met Amy & her husband Matt at nweds a couple months ago. Since then we have started a smaller bible study with them as well, and we've been so blessed by their friendship.

Matt is in the same industry as Kyle, so they always have a lot to talk about. Amy and I are exactly alike, and she seriously makes me laugh more than anyone I know. Oh man her stories are like pee-in-your-pants hilarious. Matt travels a lot too, so it's comforting to have a girlfriend who knows what I go through when Kyle travels. Anyways Amy, and I have been getting together weekly to go on walks, watch movies or eat dinner. She's a nurse at the hospital right next to our house so it works out perfectly.

I also posted a picture of her so my family could finally "meet" her! Amy and Matt sent my parents the sweetest note and gift a couple of weeks ago. They have never even met my parents, and our whole family was in tears that one of my friends would do that. I can't say enough about them. The Lord sure knows when to bring certain people into your life at the perfect time!

Top 3 Thursday: Fears

This Thursday is all about our Top 3 Fears! I'm going to combine Kyles and mine as we really only have 3 total!

1) GHOSTS. We really can't watch any movies that are about ghosts or even talk about them in general. They freak Kyle out, in every way.... and NO we have never seen one! I purposely only put a cartoon ghost up here to make it less scary :) (This is called Phasmophobia)
2) GETTING ATTACKED. This is by far my worst fear. I am so cautious about everything I do by myself because I know as a girl it is always a possibility. It scares me to even talk about it... getting attacked, taken, abused, killed.... name it and I've thought about. (I think I can blame CSI and NCIS for putting ideas in my head.) By far my worst fear of that happening to me in life. (This is called Contreltophobia or Virginitiphobia)
3) FIRES. Not really fires in general but just getting stuck inside of a fire and not being able to get out. The thought of that really does scare Kyle and I. (This is called Arsonphobia)

SO those are our Top 3 Fears! What would yours be?

Wordless Wednesday: Making up for lost cuddle time

Monkey Bread!

For our Easter breakfast, Kyle and I decided to make Monkey Bread! This recipe is used at least once a month in my family... Birthdays, Holidays, Saturdays, whatever! OK let's get started!

Ingredients:
For biscuit mixture:
3 tubes refrigerated biscuits (Grands buttermilk flaky, green can)
1 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 cup sugar
1 1/2 cup chopped pecans (optional... Kyle and I do not like nuts so we leave them out!)

For liquid mixture:
1 cup sugar
1/4 cup evaporated milk
1/4 cup brown sugar
3/4 cup butter

Instructions:
Separate biscuits and cut into quarters. Mix cinnamon and sugar. Grease 10 inch tube pan or bundt pan. Roll each piece of quartered biscuit in cinnamon and sugar mixture. Place in pan. Layer nuts and biscuits alternately.

Bring to boil the sugar, evaporated milk, brown sugar and butter. Pour boiled mixture over layered biscuits.

Bake at 325 degrees for 45 minutes. Turn out of pan onto plate. Enjoy!