Serendipity

The last four days have been brimming over with serendipity (and, as you'll see, excesses of shopping). On Friday, we went to Berkley (which I now adore and want to live in) with Mike and Chante and had an orgy of delectable pastries, excellent pizza, perfect bread, and cheese with which Jishnu wishes to have a torrid affair - and that was only the morning!

We started out at a bakery that Chante went to as a small child and literally bought them out of all their cheese puffs. I am not a great cheese-lover and much less so in the way of desserts so we only bought three of them initially and boggled at Chante when she bought a dozen. We realized that this was a huge mistake after eating one on the way back to the car. We all turned and ran back to the bakery (Chante and Mike also having decided to supplement their dozen) and begged them for whatever they had left. Sadly, the bakery only had six left - which Chante bought and then gave to us, very sweetly, when we realized that was all the bakery had left. Thanks again, Chante - we've been eating them happily!

After our bakery adventures, we went to the Cheeseboard Pizza Collective and collectively devoured one of their beautiful pizzas - it was so good that the car was silent as we all concentrated on the symphony of cheeses melted together on the crust. Our next stop was at the Cheeseboard Cheese Collective where I fell into raptures over all the bread and bought a long sourdough baguette, a hot jalapeno and cilantro X roll, and about five pounds of perfectly made English muffins and Jishnu lusted after all the cheeses and emerged from the shop with four different specimens. I'll leave it to him to give you the dirty (or rather, smelly) details on his blog.

After the food orgy, we had a grand time at Sur la Table and the Crate and Barrel Outlet. We got a ridiculously heavy cast iron skillet (I now understand why people used to use them as murder weapons) and I decided that tarts are going to be the next dessert I conquer and so I bought a tart pan and Jishnu bought a shaver/slicer for his darling cheeses. At the C&B outlet, we indulged in buying lots and lots of glasses that we don't really need but are such pretty receptacles for our drinks of choice: Coke and wine.

In between the two cooking stores, I found the sofa of my dreams, convinced Jishnu that he too longed for it and then had to leave it behind. It is soft and squishy and as deep as a twin bed and the general effect is of sleeping on fluffy leather clouds and I am now pining for it. This is it.

We concluded the day with expeditions to Ikea and Trader Joes. Ikea, of course, is impossible to leave without a random assortment of glassware, candles, hangers, and hampers so we dutifully bought varieties of all those and also a multi-level desk for Jishnu's music work. Once we clean up his studio, I'll post a picture of it. We assembled it on Saturday and since, thankfully, the Ikea instructions as hieroglyphics have improved, we had a lot of fun and came out of it feeling like carpenters.

Ack, I can't believe it has taken this many words to describe Friday - I'll leave the rest of the weekend for another post.