Here Come the Brides!

This weekend, my friend Maggie and I co-hosted a bridal shower for our friend and MCH-colleague Shannon and her fiance, Emily. Shannon and Emily are two of my very best friends in the Bay Area and I wanted this shower to really be something special for them! Most of Shannon's friends here are in our program, so we invited the whole lot of them plus Annie and Lauren, two other friends from school, and celebrated with a Cupcakes and Cocktails-themed fete.

My fabulous friend and neighbor Alyse came over in the afternoon to help me set up. We had a little station where guests could drop off gifts and write date ideas and family recipes for the brides. Then down below, we set up flowers, snacks, and the fire pit. The cupcakes and drink station were both inside the studio to keep away from the bugs! We set out champagne, red and white wine, and a make your own mojito station which I think was a big hit!

Annie made the most gourmet cupcakes -- lemon blackberry with a lemon curd filling and a white chocolate ganache (amazing, right??). Maggie whipped up some delish red velvet cupcakes with legit cream cheese frosting. Shannon, Emily, and I are all doing a nutrition challenge as part of our gym which "forbids" sugar, gluten, dairy, alcohol...all the good stuff. The cupcakes at the front are the ones I made and were challenge friendly: almond-orange base with coconut milk strawberry "frosting" (more like glaze). They were fine, but definitely didn't hold a candle to the other cupcakes! That's right, I obviously tasted everything.

We played some fun bridal shower games and talked until midnight. I never expected to make such wonderful friends in graduate school and am SO lucky to call these girls my pals. Tuck had a great time, too!! 

Congrats, Shannon and Emily! We love you!

"If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need."

When I moved to Oakland, I knew I wanted to have a garden. In Charlotte, I kept herbs on my porch and so knew the convenience of being able to pick fresh produce rather than buy it.

My mom has a a beautiful orchard in Santa Barbara: lemon, lime, apple, avocado and orange trees; blueberry and strawberry bushes; grape vines; sprawling tomato plants and vegetables of all kinds. She came to visit our house in Oakland last September and we went to Berkeley Horticulture, a great nursery in north Berkeley. She helped me pick out a bunch of baby vegetable plants, herbs, and young trees. We spent the weekend mixing soil and planting a variety of vegetables...and then I began to wait. A few weeks later, the veggies started to pop (with a Tucker photobomb):

From left: Herbs in the box and snap peas (back row); bok choy, 2 kinds of broccoli, 2 kinds of kale, spinach, green onions, and arugula (front row)

As the weeks went by, I couldn't believe how well the garden was doing. Maybe it was the earthworm casings we mixed in with the soil, maybe we just had great seedlings, but either way, the produce was plentiful. I have absolutely LOVED having this garden in my yard. I go out nearly every day and cut some arugula or spinach for salads. The broccoli had some trouble growing, but I learned that you can cook the leaves and they taste just like broccoli. We used bok choy instead of celery during the winter in soups, and it was delicious. The snap pea plants are now completely taking over the garden -- this picture was taken a few weeks ago, and if you can imagine, the snap peas now completely cover that siding and reach high above the fence (again, Tucker just had to be in the picture): 

I mean, come on! So beautiful!

I've also been able to tie this hobby into my academic work by studying community and school gardens' effect on health. So many communities in the Bay Area are food insecure, and community gardens can offer access to fresh produce for low-income families.

Alice Waters, the superhero behind The Edible Schoolyard and Chez Panisse, is somewhat of a controversial character in the East Bay in that she seems to ignore the issue of access regarding school gardens. While her Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley gets a large sum of money from donors each year (I've heard it's around $400k), many Oakland schools operate on a much smaller budget (again, I've heard this is about $15k per school). While it may not be the taxpayer's responsibility to enhance the garden budgets for these schools, there is plenty of evidence linking gardens and access to fresh food with better performance in schools: investing in school gardens is investing in the academic success of kids. I don't want to take any sort of political stance on this issue, but I DO believe that every kid and family has the right to access healthy, fresh food and that it will ultimately improve their chance for success later in life!!

Okay, I'm off my soapbox.

"But if each man could have his own house, a large garden to cultivate and healthy surroundings - then, I thought, there will be for them a better opportunity of a happy family life."

Back...again

Well, after ANOTHER long absence, I am recommitting (again) to this blog. I really do love going through my old posts, so even if no one else reads this, keeping an online "journal" of my life is worth it for me. And with that in mind...

I'm sitting in the Dulles airport right now after spending the last few days in DC visiting two of my best friends from Davidson, Alex and Sara. Sara ran the DC Rock ‘n Roll Half Marathon and so Alex and I, along with a gaggle of Sara’s other friends from high school, made signs and cheered all morning! Pretty sure our signs worked, since Sara crushed her previous PR and finished in 1:50. Yeah, she ran 13.1 miles almost 40 minutes faster than I have. Such a star!

We spent the rest of Saturday brunching and engaging in debauchery. Friday had been really low key (Sara and Alex both took Friday off of work, so we had lunch at Founding Farmer’s and then walked around the city) and so we had a lot of giggles to release.

Spending weekends with my best friends is such a weird mix of being so utterly happy to be with them and grateful to have them in my life, and feeling so sad that our lives are so far from one another. Twice yearly visits aren’t enough.

If only DC and San Francisco were squished together…

We did decide that when we “grow up,” we all have to buy a beach house together, so at least there's that.