Big news – Brad graduated from his master’s program on Friday! In a few short weeks, we’ll be moving from Berkeley, which has been our home for the past year, to Oakland, CA. We are incredibly excited for this next phase in our lives (and exploring a new part of the Bay Area) but I couldn’t leave Berkeley without doing a tribute to one of our very favorite restaurants – East Bay Spice Company!
The incredible “scout mint” ice cream at Molly Moon’s!
This weekend, I took a quick trip to Seattle to visit my best friend Emily – and eat my weight in delicious things to report back to you all, of course. I’m so excited to share my favorite eats in Seattle with you guys – well, my favorite eats I could pack into 48 hours, at least!
Seattle is a very cool city – it reminds me of LA in that it feels very urban, but also spread out and spacious at the same time. It’s filled with fun neighborhoods that each have their own vibe to them, and there are parks and open green spaces, bike trails along the water, and all kinds of nature everywhere. Plus, the emphasis on locally grown, healthy sustainable food is found everywhere you look and is incredibly admirable – the excitement around Pacific Northwest food culture in Seattle is totally infectious. Emily and I ate a lot this weekend, and she was the best kind of tour guide (food-focused, that is). Here are some of my favorite things we ate!
Gorgeous grapes at Benziger winery in Sonoma, CA!
Today’s post is brought to you by means of “too much vacay, too little time.” I’ve been out of town for three of the past four weekends, so the cooking and relaxing at home time has been minimal and the eating/drinking lots of delicious and decadent things time has been what’s up. Tough life, right?!
Next week, we’ll be back to our regular scheduled recipe programming, but today, I am super excited to share some of the awesome gems from our recent Sonoma trip! We’ve lied in the Bay Area for 6 months now and haven’t been up to wine country yet, so we were super excited for this trip. Our close friends from college came up from LA to visit us (and the wine) this past weekend. The six of us drove up to Sonoma, hit up a tour and two tastings in one day (plus a fantastic dinner) and ended the evening by drinking two incredible bottles of wine that we bought throughout the day while wearing PJs in the hotel lobby. Now if that’s not a perfect day, I don’t know what is!
So, considering we went to Chez Panisse for our anniversary in April, I’d say this post is way overdue.
But!! I had good reasons. I had bar nuts and no-churn ice cream and mac n’ cheese to share. In fact, I was saving this post for a “rainy day” (which in food blog world means a failed recipe, shhh) and a batch of delicious but incredibly falling-apart-and-totally-unphotographably-messy black bean burgers was justttt the ticket. Sigh. On the bright side, I finally get to talk about arguably the most influential foodie restaurant in our new city, Chez Panisse!