**photos may not be in chronological order**
A day after we reached Houston after leaving Orlando, we were on our way to Austin, the capital of Texas, where my eldest cousin and her husband lived, which was a 2.5 hours drive away.
Here's our breakfast the next morning- Pancakes and waffles using the same batter! Served with ice-cream, noms!
This is Sydney, my cousin's labrador retriever, and probably the most hyper dog I've ever met. When we first entered the house she was so excited she rammed into the back of my thigh ( all 75 pounds of her) and it hurt for minutes after!! She's so freaking adorable though <3
We went to this place for dinner of the first day I think... I have no idea why they would call themselves 'the worst'...Reverse psychology perheaps? :P
This store is a vegetarian's nightmare O:
We got a whole loaf of bread to share amongst our 2 families- still warm!
And a whole lot of meat to eat with it :P Sausage, chicken, moist brisket..
And the sides are so good too! Creamed corn, coleslaw and baked beans with pulled pork.
The food was awesome but we couldn't finish it so we took quite a lot of leftovers home :P
We went shopping after and bought this gingerbread kit!
In the kid: Readymade gingerbread, assorted candies, a bag of icing sugar for frosting and a lil gingerbread man.
Ready to begin!
We spent like 3 hours++ doing it..but it was fun, and worth it :)
Cousin popped us some corn halfway to eat using her cool popcorn maker and the recently bought blue popcorn! Super cool, I wish I had such cool gadgets at home :'(
Check out our creation! Looks good enough to eat ;)
Random photo of Sydney and I awwww :')
Fast forward: We had lunch at this place! P Terry's Burger Stand
Their lemonade is really good and authentic! :)
Look at the mound of burgers and fries we got
Was a bit sick of meat so I ordered a veggie burger!
The inside of the burger..It was sooo good!<3 I told myself that I needed to replicate this at home...all I know is that there are black beans in the patty though. I didn't miss the meat one bit ;)
Huge amount of freshly made shoestring fries! Since they were so skinny they weren't very filling so we managed to finish em :)
Next we headed over to Cosco ( a wholesale megamart which sells things by the bulk) where I was so amazed by the variety of stuff sold!
We were planning to have an early christmas dinner that night so we bought steak- ribeye, which is the most premium cut and could cost up to US$40 per portion in restaurants. Here we got one steak each amounting to a total of US$99 for 10! O:
Our dishes for that night: I made the one in the middle; sweet potato pecan casserole and the one on the right is green bean casserole made by my cousin.
The table setup- so pretty and christmassy right?? <3
Our starter soup was a chinese dish of sweet corn with potatoes, cabbage and carrot in a chicken broth. So yummy!
And some honey butter cornbread which tasted amazing with the soup :)
Close up of the side dishes!
And the star of the show: The steak! Broiled to perfection, medium rare and so tender and juicy <3 My cousin can open a steak restaurant!! However a good steak must have its fats but I felt that it was too oily for me ): Steak is not my thing I guess but I do appreciate the deliciousness of this one!
Oh yeah, cousin and I baked some christmas cookies using the new cookie cutters bought from Walmart. They turned out pretty successful! We wanted to frost them too but ran out of time ):
The next few days were spent walking a lot and seeing the nature in Austin!
Mckinney falls- one of the state parks we went to. Unfortunately due to the dry weather there was not enough water for it to 'fall'...The pic above^ is supposed to be the 'upper falls' part :P
Umm, a little fall maybe?
Love the sky!
Sydney came along! She was soo excited to go out and had quite a fun time splashing about the water.
After our hike we went to a German town whose name I can't remember, and had dinner at an authentic German restaurant, which was supposed to be very popular and people even had to take queue numbers on good days!
Fortunately we went on a weekday so it wasn't crowded at all, in fact it was quite quiet.
Brother ordered a signature dish of pork sausages with sides of green bean, potato salad and served with multigrain bread. His was the first to come and the portion was SCARILY huge. Like even if i were starving I may not be able to finish it kind of huge O:
Dad ordered a mexican salad as pictured above^. Well if I thought my bro's one was scary this was worse! It's much bigger than it looks in the picture and one cannot see any veggies in this 'salad' at all! Smothered with shreds of cheese and oily tortillas- a dieter's worst nightmare haha
This was our appetizer! Deep fried mushrooms served with sour cream- one of their signature dishes. It was gooood as far as fried vegetables go <3
Mom and I thought we were being healthy by ordering the soups, a potato one and a hungarian goulash for me( beef stew, essentially) but the portions were quite big too and rich. I didn't take a photo though..
I could see why this place is so popular! So much rich food at reasonable prices with humongous portions, which American wouldn't like it? ;)
Sunset that day- taken from the car
We also visited Enchanted rock which is this huge looking rock as pictured above^
It was surprisingly easy to climb to the summit, and we took quite a short time. As usual, the beautiful azure blue sky amazed me!!
This looks like autumn in winter
Cute Sydney got her paw 'stuck' in her leash! She wants to be a 3 legged dog haha
On one of the days we had dinner at Panera Bread again-yup, the same eatery we went in Austin!
This time my aunt ordered a Bear's Claw for us to try. It was really sweet and the pastry was nice and flaky :)
We ordered black bean soup with the same tuna sandwich! I totally fell in love with black beans after drinking this <3
On our last night we went for this Christmas trail called the trail of lights.. It was pretty crowded so we didn't manage to see many of the lighted up sculptures.
We did see this HUGE christmas tree though! We even went UNDER it ;)
I had a great time at Austin and I really love my cousin's house!! So many kitchen gadgets and such a huge oven, my dream kitchen <3 We went back to Houston the next day, the 19th in time to catch the Houston Rockets ( NBA show), to fulfill my basketball-loving brother's wildest dreams.. and it was definitely fulfilled and more ;)
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