Making Dreams Come True

A year ago when Alpa moved into her new condo, she noticed that there was a guy who lived across the way from her who liked to cook in his boxers and occasionally roamed his studio naked. She has long called him her "Naked Chef." She has spent the entire year watching him from her couch and ogling from afar.

On Friday night, Jessie and I wandered over to Alpa's apartment for a chill evening of girl talk and go fish. The Naked Chef was at it again finishing up his dinner in his kitchen and doing dishes in his boxers as usual. We girls watched him and giggled and gave Alpa a lot of crap for not having met him yet after a year of watching him.

Jessie then managed to catch his eye and wave at him. He saw us and waved back. I suggested that we tape Alpa's phone number to the window and see if he calls. This was a suggestions that I had made many times before, but previously no one had listened. This time, Jessie sprung into action and we started looking for paper. In no time, we had Jessie's phone number cut out of binder paper and taped to the window.

Less than a minute after we finished pasting the number on the window, the Naked Chef called. Ironically, his name is Jesse too. Jessie cordially invited him over for a drink.

Jesse came over and through our conversation with him we discovered that he too was an IT consultant and lives in apartment 302. He likes surfing and is from Canada.

After all of this time, I'm not sure if it was anti-climatic for Alpa to finally meet him, but he's still pretty cute in person. Just a good guy who loves working out and enjoys SF.

The mystery around the Naked Chef is now solved and Alpa as now thanked Jessie and I for making her dream come true of meeting her Naked Chef.

Now the bigger question, does the Naked Chef still cook naked after all of this?

Strawberries and Angel Food Cake

Last night, I decided to be lazy for dessert night and just pick up an angel food cake and 4 lbs of strawberries. It was just the laziness that I needed and something that everyone enjoyed.

Here's a shot of Ryan enjoying his concoction.


Candace was looking out for everyone's calcium intake by making sure that we all had shots of milk. Here's her with one.


All in all it was a great and chill evening. Stay tuned for make your own sweet or savory crepes next week!

My First Passover

Despite the fact that I was invited to Passover at J's last year, I attended my first two Seders this year with him and his family. For those of you who haven't been to a Seder before, there are two main parts of the meal: 1. the story with some small bites of food that has significance in the story and 2. the full dinner.

The story is quite interesting to me because it's the part of the Bible carefully glossed over in my religious schooling. The Christians are much more interested in the New Testament because it involves Jesus and Jews are interested in the Old Testament because of it's lack of Jesus.

It was a great story and fun to listen to everyone reading around the table. Luckily, in addition to the Hebrew, the English was also in the book so I could understand all that was going on without having years of Hebrew schooling.

Now for the food. Matzah is awesome, particularly with horseradish. Mmmm. It's a great compliment to the haroset. Dinner was excellent and after 5 or so glasses of wine, a sugary dessert was just what I needed.

All in all, it was a fun weekend of excellent food and company. I'm really glad that I got to enjoy this tradition.

Dulce de Leche Chocolate Chunk Bread Pudding

Wow, it's taken me a really long time to get this post out this week. It has been a very busy week. This week, I had no idea what I was going to make for dessert night. Luckily ChuThis stepped in and provided a recipe that she's been wanting to try. It fit all of my criteria for my available schedule this week for dessert making so I tried it.

The recipe calls for an egg bread of some sort. The only already made, widely known egg bread that I could think of was challah and since it's around Passover, it was widely available. The only thing that would make me consider not using challah next time is it's distinct taste.

All in all, it was very good. You definitely need to have lots of extra dulce de leche sauce and vanilla ice cream to go along with it.

It was so enticingly good that we ate almost half of it before I remembered to take the picture.

Click here to find the recipe care of Epicurious.

Toasty Weekends in April

This past weekend was one of those gorgeous weekends where you know you made the right choice to live in the Bay Area because there's absolutely no way that anywhere else is as gorgeous. It was a busy weekend for me because I've felt behind in life and so I tried to use this weekend to catch up.

I spent a lovely Saturday hanging out in the MixMatchOffice for their monthly coding day. It's very nice to chill on a comfy couch, listen to great music and hang out with cool people while having the garage doors open and enjoying the warm breeze and sunshine. It was a very productive day too which was nice.

How about going out in San Francisco at 10pm and not needing a jacket? Yeah, that almost NEVER happens! It was so gorgeous.

Yesterday evening ended with a lovely dinner at J's parent's house in their garden. So nice and peaceful.

All in all, a relaxing and productive weekend.

On a side note, Congratulations to Paige who was crowned the Master of Funk this weekend!!! You go girl!

Champagne Chiffon Cake! Mmmmm.

Last week, I added a bunch of new dessert blogs to my Google reader because I felt that I should broaden my recipes from just those of William Sonoma. Thanks to ChuThis for those suggestions!

On one of my newly tagged blogs, I found this lovely recipe for a Champagne Chiffon cake. I thought I should have cake for dessert night since we've had all sorts of other things, but no cakes. I wanted something easy to make that didn't require a lot of extra time messing around with frosting, since I did that last week, or layer cakes.

Thus, Champagne cake it was. This is a very easy cake, but you definitely need one of the pans where the bottom comes out, like you would use for Angel Food cake. The recipe was really easy to make with the exception of folding the egg whites into the champagne cake flour batter part. Luckily, Baking Bites addressed that and recommended folding in some of the egg whites before you fold in all of them so the batter is a bit easier to mix.

Here's a pic of this week's tasty treat.


Thanks to Candace for all of her help!

Click here if you want this week's recipe.

There's a Gummy Worm in My Dirt!

April Fools!

I had fun with April Fools for yesterday's dessert night and served my guests Dirt and grape cranberry juice instead of wine. The wine was particularly amusing as guests weren't expecting it. Check out the cool dirt!


Before dessert night, J came over to raid my fridge for food as usual. He found a plate of spaghetti and meatballs waiting for him, except the spaghetti was made out of buttercream frosting and topped with strawberry sauce and chocolate maltballs.


All in all, it was a fun evening!


...For those of you who haven't read the book called There's a Hair in My Dirt, you just must. It's funny.