Hi friends!
I knoooow. I’ve been extremely MIA lately. In the midst of my excitement about last post’s KIND bar/Gotein giveaway, I somehow forgot to mention that I was taking a trip home.
Even though I now live in Washington, DC, my heart will always belong to the San Francisco Bay Area!
The first three nights of my trip, my family and I stayed at a boutiquey hotel.
Translation, “boutiquey”: no TV or internet access in the room. Aka not good conditions for a blogger. :-/
However, even though I felt disconnected from you all, in retrospect it was refreshing to unplug for awhile. Very limited access to blogs and Twitter allowed me to connect more personally with family and friends. That said, I’m so happy to be back, and am excited share what I’ve been up to the past four days. (Bloggers: I promise I’ll be catching up on all your lives this week as well!)
Okay, ready to see the good stuff? 
As you may know, hundreds of innovative food companies and foodies call the San Francisco Bay Area “home,” just as I do.
Mariposa Bakery (more to come in my next post!)
I had the opportunity to sample so many delicious locally-made goodies on this trip! WAY too many to share in this post, so be expecting recaps this week.
I spent the weekend in Berkeley–my childhood home–celebrating the life of my grandma with my family. You may remember that she passed away last spring, and that when she died, I comforted myself by baking her fudge pie, Heath crunch cake and meringues.
On Saturday we had a memorial serice in her memory. I thought it would be a neat idea to print some of my grandma’s most well-known recipes on cards so that guests could carry on her culinary tradition in their own kitchens.
Aren’t Grandma’s recipes always best?!
The memorial service was truly beautiful. People from all over the world cmae and shared their memories of her with my family.
And we feasted quite nicely too. Just as Grandma would have wanted.
See’s chocolates, her favorite, were obviously mandatory. 
Me with my cousins Sarah and Lauren
Remember in my last post I mentioned that I’d been eating out quite frequently? Well, this week hasn’t been any different.
That’s the nature of traveling, right? When you’re on the road, sometimes meals look like this:
And sometimes they look like this:
The picture above is documentation of the “oh no I slept too late and missed the complimentary breakfast” hotel room breakfast. Yeah, I was definitely feeling some fruit overload after that one.
Sometimes nighttime snacks look like this.
I eat cottage cheese, peanut butter and granola (this was 18 Rabbits Pecan, Almond and Maple) almost every night at home, and find that maintaining that consistency when I travel is a nice way to balance out rich meals
And sometimes they look like this.
Last nightI scrapped consistency and enjoyed this treat from Mariposa Bakery before bed. There are no more words.
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And now…the winner of that giveaway!
My brother is lying on the hotel bed next to me as I type this post, so I asked him to pick a number between 1 and 77.
His choice?
53.
That means that the winner is Amanda at Running With Spoons!
Congrats, Amanda! Please e-mail me your contact info and I’ll put your KIND bars and Gotein protein powder in the mail!
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I truly love you all SO SO SO SO much! Thank you for encouraging and inspiring me each and every day.
Do you seek out “consistency comfort” foods while traveling? Or do you prefer to wing it and eat whatever you stumble across?
Brownies or chocolate chip cookies?
I always stock up on apples, bananas, carrots, peanut butter, cottage cheese and string cheese for snacks, but usually opt to sample the local cuisine at meal time.
And I definitely can’t choose between brownies and cookies, but I suppose if I had to, I’d go with a moist brownie.
