Pitter-patter-y weekends

{  EEek! First big project!  |  May 2013  }

This weekend was one of those rare blocks of 48-hours that were entirely mine—all mine, mine, mine! With R working Saturday and Sunday, plus a nasty weather forecast, I gave myself permission to spend my weekend doting (almost) completely on myself.

On Saturday I cleaned the apartment, organized the fridge in anticipation of a huge grocery shop that I got to lovingly arrange the way I like (those first two might not seem very "dote-y", but I can't relax until everything is pretty and clean!), talked to my needy plants and fed them and arranged two huge new bouquets of fresh flowers (pink, lilac and white tulips in the living room and huge branches of stargazer lilies in our bedroom).

Then I spent a few hours of grumble-grumble-translating-grumble-grumble, followed by another few hours starting a new knitting project. This is my first "big" one (meaning, not a baby gift, winter accessory or home good), one that I had to measure myself for and poke at a calculator to figure out dimensions and gauge in order to not completely screw it up. I'm also finally starting to use the fancy yarn I bought back in March, but was too scared to use until now.

And that was basically the extent of Saturday.

Sunday I decided to completely give myself over to even more gluttony since I considered Saturday afternoon's annoying translating work to have infringed on my weekend of decadence, so I rolled out of bed and shuffled to the kitchen to concoct a ridiculous stack of almond flour + cacao pancakes, layered with alternating (so ridiculous) schmears of almond butter and cashew butter, with chunks of banana nestled in, too. A nice mug of coffee + cream completed the picture.

{  Almond flour, cashew butter, choco-banana pancakes + mug o'coffee  |  May 2013  }

Then, there was some reading of blogs, a little working out, talking with the family and more knitting (please note: the soundtrack to this entire weekend was nonstop episodes of an array of shows on Netflix + 1 movie). I also decided to make a nice dinner for R, which involved prepping a cute little chicken in the morning (I read that if you're roasting a chicken, you can get super crispy skin by salting the birdie and letting it rest uncovered in the fridge for as long as possible, up to 24 hours).

So I did that and set a proper table—baptizing the neutral-toned cotton napkins I knit for us after envying the fresh, nautical ones I made for my friend's birthday—and marinated some tomatoes and red onion for a burrata salad over mache.

When R came home I helped him out of his wet shoes and coat (totally unnecessary, but I figured he needed some decadence, too), shooed him into the candle-lit bathroom for a shower and then welcomed him to the couch for a cocktail (I had his whisky glass waiting) and chat before we sat down to dinner, and later, a movie.

{ Place setting with my new handknit napkins! }

{ Roast chicken + burrata salad }

Most definitely a delicious weekend—in every sense of the word.