They Say It's Your Birthday

Tonight Jill organized a belated birthday dinner for me at FareStart in downtown Seattle. FareStart is a charity organization whose goal is to provide life service skills and job training in the food service industry to homeless men and women. Graduates from their program are placed in a variety of food service-related positions such as restaurant kitchens and dining rooms, foodservice companies, and banquet operations.

Every Thursday evening, FareStart brings in a special guest chef for a charity dinner to raise money for the organization. Tonight's dinner was sponsored by Lisa Dupar of Lisa Dupar Catering. I had a yummy vegetarian entree which consisted of a gnocchi with roasted squash in a sage cream sauce.

11 of my best friends joined us for dinner which made for a very enjoyable celebration. It was great to get to chat with everyone and catch up on what folks have been up to lately. I even scored a copy of Madden 2005 and a gift certificate to the Sonic Boom as birthday presents! To top it off, as a group we ended up donating $300 to FareStart. We are also going to submit it through our corporate matching program which should bring the total to $600! All in all a really great experience, and definitely something I'd like to do again for future birthdays :-)