She's leaving on a jetplane

Sad news: Orla, queen of banoffee pie and Irish beer, is leaving NYC tomorrow after a quarter in the USA. We sent her off in true Creative Lab fashion with a bottle of wine....each, at Ed's house on Monday night. She will be missed, but luckily she will also be back.

In honor of her departure I baked the above chocolate peanut butter cup cakes. The only thing better than peanut butter is peanut butter with butter and sugar added (this is peanut butter frosting). Yummo.

In Preparation for Turkey Day....

I've been, unintentionally, stretching out my stomach so I can consume as much as possible on Thanksgiving.

It started with a lovely (I-can't-believe-it's)-Goodbye dinner for Tori who is moving back to the Best coast to be with her fiance. Tiny person, huge loss. I will miss her terribly. Here she is in my kitchen, for the first, and hopefully not last, time:

The meal was brought to you by the food processor-- I made both hummus and pesto in it! What a magical appliance. It was accompanied by a roasted squash (god do I love a mutant f'ing squash) salad from Tory, crumbs cupcakes brought by Stephie, and too much wine from our guest of honor. Though I am forever faithful to Billy's Bakery, Crumbs are quite delightful and the fact that they are mini makes sampling 6 flavors more acceptable (point, Crumbs).

I swear the Goog chefs always know when I'm in a fat/hungover mood. Today at lunch proved that Google still thinks (knows?) that the way to their employees hearts is through their stomachs. They served Pasta Breadbowls....a concept I have only ever heard of from Dominos. I must admit that I've been curious about these carb lovers dream bowls before, but could never bring myself to say the words "Yes I'd like a pasta bread bowl" to a human on the phone. Well luckily at Goog, I didn't have to say a thing...just line up with the rest of these soon-to-be-heartburned Goog employees and lift this (at least 1 lb) bowl of regret.....
And yes, I ate it. It was as decadently good as you imagine.

This=Devestating

This is the worst news since the discontinuation of Domino Mag.

From today's SF Gate:

Organizers of the annual Bay to Breakers race, a 12K-run that starts at the Embarcadero and ends at Ocean Beach, have announced that this year there will be a major crackdown on the drunken, costumed revelry that trails the real runners.

For 97 years the race has traversed San Francisco -- most recently trailed by thousands of intoxicated (and often naked) participants pushing festive keg-toting floats.

This year, there will be a zero-tolerance policy for alcohol and all floats, according to a news release from sponsor ING.

This is terrible, horrible, no-good news. So many great memories from that race, especially the notorious Noah's Arc year, when we were interviewed by the paper about why our arc broke completely before mile 2 and Dusty told them we were Cal Engineering students....

However it does make me feel a little better about not living in SF anymore.

Irish Goodbye'ing SF.

This sucks. I normally would throw a huge party for myself with an obnoxious theme and invite everyone I know in SF (and lots of people I don't know) to celebrate my coming, going, coming of age, or whatever. But as Dary said, you can't throw a goodbye party where more than half of the invite list won't have seen you since your welcome home party. True story. So, instead, I had an intimate goodbye dinner, in the same location with mostly the same attendees as the welcome home dinner 3 months ago. And that's it. Somehow with less people there, it was more sad. Maybe with a larger group the emotion would have disappated. But instead, after 2 hours of tacos and the requisit stop to the Cougar Den a patient cab driver waited 20 minutes on Washington b/w Franklin and Gough as Neva and I sobbed and sniffled into each other's peacoats. Boo.