On Saturday, I spent most of the day preparing for a dinner date I had with the lovely Maggie. It took me a while to decide what to cook, and in the end, I went with lumpia, pancit sotanghon, and leche flan. All Filipino recipes, and all delicious. I started by preparing the flan, since it needed to time to bake and cool. The recipe didn’t bother to tell me the serving size, but luckily I picked up extra foil pans. I ended up with 3 delicious leche flans. Next was the laborious pancit sotanghon. I had to soak the noodles for 2 hours, boil and shred the chicken, chop all the vegetables, then throw it all into a skillet and stir fry that puppy until it was just right. I had to make this in two batches, again due to the lack of serving size information. (I really should’ve realized , being Filipino, that when we cook, we cook a lot.) The lumpia was store bought, because making lumpia is an all-day event, and ain’t no way I’m making that as well as the pancit and leche flan.

Aside from a few personal critiques, everything turned out quite well, especially considering I could barley make scrambled eggs before this weekend. Maggie was also pleased and impressed… mission accomplished.

Last night, my neighbor, Caroline, invited me to a dinner with her friends. Since the dinner was taking place just outside my door, there really wasn’t a way she couldn’t invite me. Score!

Since August is when most Parisians take their vacation, most of them had just returned, and along with two birthdays, there was great cause for celebration. Caroline herself had just returned from singing Tahiti and Los Angeles, Dorothy spent 4 weeks tanning in Vietnam and Camille practiced her Spanish in Mexico. Caroline returned with a lot of souvenirs from Tahiti, one of which was a delicious recipe for a pasta dish with shrimp, pineapple, and coconut milk. Afterwards we had “joyeaux anniversaire” cake and Vietnamese candy courtesy of Dorothy.

Among the group there was a graphic design student, philosophy student, jazz musician, business consultant, international law student, and the equivalent of a well-paid international social worker. At first, they were all kind enough to speak English with me, but after the 3rd bottle of wine was poured, the kindness was replaced with a laidback familiarity that can only be found from young, well-relaxed, well-vacationed, French people.

Saturday began with a brisk jog, stop laughing, then followed by a huge and carb-loaded late breakfast, which bascially cancelled out the prior jog. Aileen and Jessika accompanied me for the late breakfast, then soon after, we made our way to Ballard to catch throw me the statue and Husbands, Love Your Wives, who were performing to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of 20Twenty. Jamie Speiss, who herself makes up HLYW, is also an avid baker, and after her performance, she held a Cake Walk. This fabulous thing is similar to musical chairs, but instead of chairs, you have numbered stickers on the floor. When the music stops, Jamie picks out a number randomly, and whoever is on that number wins a cake. Unfortunately, I didn’t win, but luckily she sold slices afterwards, and the girls and I had a very ravenous cake exchange, where we gorged off each others slices, with extreme prejudice.

Last night was Dine for Darfur in Seattle, a fund raiser with participating restaurants in which 25% of their proceeds from yesterday will go toward relief efforts for Darfur. I went with my friends, Melinda and Ross, to Coastal Kitchen to do our part. As suspected, the place was packed and there was an hour wait for tables. The people in the lobby seemed happy to wait, and held no gripes about the abnormally long waiting list. Luckily, we found 3 seats at the bar and decided to just eat there. I ordered a delicious linguine dish with craw fish, shrimp and salmon sausage, however I was really jealous of Ross’ pecan-encrusted salmon, that shizznit was da bomb.

Afterwards, we had a drink at Linda’s, who was also participating but instead called it “Pints for Darfur”. We each had a couple drinks at Coastal Kitchen, so the drink we bought at Linda’s gave me a pretty decent buzz. Then Melinda convinced to have another drink at Cha Cha, unfortunately they were not participating (cause they hate poor Sudanese children… jk!). We then took pictures in their photo booth, and I semi-stumbled home afterwards. All in all, I had a good night for a good cause. Too bad these types of fund raisers don’t occur more frequently, because if I’m going to get plastered, I might as well get plastered for a good cause.