Variations on a Bird: The Erin & Francesca Story

Erin and I have been having some lovely cooking dates recently. The flavors and techniques, while all very different, have revolved around the same canvas: a whole chicken.

It began with the simple roasted chicken, with carrots, fennel, and onions.


The saga continued with Coq au Vin...delicious, falling off the bone, and totally worth the wait.


Tonight, we mixed it up. While roast chickens are amazing, they are definitely not a weeknight-friendly meal (unless you feel like eating at 10:45). So, we decided to make steak fajitas with sweet potato and chipotle. They were delicious, and very quick, thanks to our friends at Real Simple magazine, whose articles on organization and home makeovers make me want to be a better, less messy person.
In our cooking frenzy (and rush to get to the couch to watch The Wire - my new obsession that Erin is enabling), I forgot to take a photo. Below is what Real Simple thinks it should look like. Our version, of course, was not perfected by a food stylist, but I trust it was equally awesome.


So, as you can imagine, writing (or attempting to write) 7 pages a night has taken up a lot of my time, and the blog has been a little neglected this week. Also, I'm running a 5k on Saturday, so I've been on the treadmill fairly religiously lately. Things should calm down this weekend, and I'll have some more updates and novel snippets to share!

2 Things I Made From Scratch Today

The first is a little comfort food stew I made (no recipe!), basically a riff on one of my Mom's signature dishes. I felt very competent, sauteing my onions, chopping my parsley, etc...


With luck, it should feed me at work for most of the week. Saving money is a beautiful & delicious thing.

The second is this - a little free write I did this evening. I'm experimenting with proprioceptive writing as a way to mine inspiration a little differently. We shall see...

I left work at five o'clock on a mission, a sense of purpose that felt completely foreign. I needed a zebra aloe plant. If I went to sleep with that plant on my formerly barren windowsill, things would be better in the morning.

At a job where my most pressing tasks involve making sure there is enough coffee for thirty investment bankers to drink when they saunter into work in the morning, each day is an exercise in keeping myself occupied. For the most part, after navigating the complex list of websites the company blocks, I am entertained by the New York Times. Their seemingly never-ending supply of slideshows, "multimedia wedding announcements", and stories on everything from natural disasters to the MTA discontinuing student Metrocards is a godsend in my line of work.

My favorite section is in Sunday Styles, titled Home & Garden, though I have neither. I have Apartment & Dying Daisies in a Cloudy Vase. But that's the great thing about the Times. They don't just cater to people who have townhouses and charming neighborhood gardens. They're also talking to me, the young, relatively poor, yet endlessly aspiring class of person. They know what I want, and there it was - in a new slideshow: Apartment Gardens. The Zebra Aloe was the first slide: "visually arresting" and apparently almost impossible to kill. Perfect.

Equally perfect was the fact that, although I live on a somewhat forlorn stretch of First Avenue, my closest subway stop was in completely respectable proximity to the "Upper East Side" of fancy and comprehensive florists, which the Times, in her infinite wisdom, referenced at the end of the article. And so I left at 5 precisely. After all, the florist at East 87th Street closed precisely at 6, I needed that plant, and it couldn't wait until tomorrow.


PS. By popular demand, a photo of the zebra aloe!