Sometimes I can’t believe how blessed we are with our friends in DC.

We have met some great people in this city, gotten to know some awesome people at work or church, been surprised by roommates we love, or met friends of friends that we are so excited to have in our lives.

But what really makes me cry happy tears if I think about it too much is the divine serendipity that has kept friends from childhood or college in our lives as we moved out here. We live in a world where people constantly have friends for a moment, or a season, but I am so blessed that some of those seasons just keep expanding.

One such friend is this lovely lady, Christine. We met on our very first day of college orientation and stayed close throughout college, bonding over our mutual hatred of winter, many trips to Wal-Mart, and a shared love of good clothes and food. Our social lives went different ways halfway through college, but our senior year we decided that to stay close we needed to be intentional about time spent together and so we started cooking dinner together every Wednesday. After college, Christine moved to DC and I to France, and we very likely could have drifted apart. Instead, I started visiting James in DC and staying with her. When I moved to DC, we decided to restart our weekly meals and Thursday breakfast dates were born. I can’t even begin to express how dear these times are.

A lot has happened in the past two years. There’s been a lot of laughter, lots of tears, lots of hard talks, but silly ones too. And in May, there is going to be a wedding of this lovely lady and her amazing man! More pictures of that to come later this spring.

On Friday night, a group of us went out to celebrate Christine and her upcoming wedding. It was the perfect low-key evening of good food at Hank’s Oyster Bar, followed by more good food back at Christine’s house.  Here are a couple shots from the evening.

In case you were wondering, that amazing cake with the raspberries on it is sugar free, flour free, and otherwise paleo. Oh and it tastes like MAGIC rather than sawdust. The recipe was provided by Christine’s amazing cook nutritionist sister (check out all the recipes on her blog!) and you can find it here, with the frosting here. The strawberry cake was this one that I can’t get enough of and the coconut peanut butter cookies are here. That awesome fruit tart was handmade by the fine people of Trader Joe’s.

May you all be blessed with good friends. They are the greatest blessing. And may you spend lots of time with them eating good food. Because that is the best way to enjoy the greatest blessing.