This past weekend my husband and I went to Blackberry Farms in the Smokey Mountains. If you have never been or heard of Blackberry Farms I definitely recommend it (or at the very least… check it out!). Not only is it gorgeous there but the food is amazing and the service is outstanding. They really go above and beyond to make sure you have a fabulous time. 
There are so many amazing things about this trip I don’t even know where to begin. So I shall start with the rooms as they were the first thing we saw when we got there once we checked in. Our room was GORGEOUS and we had our own little porch!! At night they even lit our fire place before we got back into our rooms! So cozy!
One of the favorite things we did at Blackberry Farms was have a picnic at the boat house. The view was amazing and the food was delicious…pork and ham sandwiches on a ciabatta roll with pickled cabbage…YUM. Not to mention all the sides…a beet salad, quinoa salad, homemade potato chips, trail cookies… I will cheers to that!
Below is a shot of the boathouse where we had our picnic:
And of course no visit to the Smokey Mountains is complete without a hike…and hike we did…
There were so many amazing dishes and food opportunities on this trip as I started to mention before so it is hard for me to narrow my list down to just a few things to share with you but in the cooking demonstration we took part in the chef made a sweet potato leaf dish. Yes you read that right, you can eat the leaves off a sweet potato plant! I absolutely LOVE sweet potatoes but had never heard of cooking with the leaves so it was very interesting to me and also very delicious. They are a little rare to find…but I am going to keep my eye out…they are that good!
Another favorite dish from the trip is this sweet tea sorbet with hazelnut tuille. Recreating this will be a must! It is extremely refreshing and I definitely see myself making it come this spring or summer!
The weather there this time of year is absolutely beautiful…during the day it was in the 60’s and it dropped down to about 45 degrees in the morning and evening. As you can see from the photos, the leaves are just starting to change colors there. Below is a shot of a small lake we came across on one of our walks. It was one of our favorite spots.
And below is me on a swing on a huge tree on the property:
All in all a beautiful weekend. It was so nice to take the time to spend just the two of us. Not to mention catch up on some sleep:). And a big shout out to my Mom and Dad for watching the Emster while we could get away!! THANK YOU!!