I love Friday evenings. Work is done for the week, I usually don’t have to schlep into the City, and Chris works late at the restaurant. Sometimes I have dinner with my bodacious neighbor, Jasmine, which usually means to two of us, totally wrung out from the week, taking stock of our respective fridges and coming up with some sort of hodgepodge meal to be eaten in sweatpants while Pico jumps around or sniffs timidly after Jasmine’s sweet cat, Oona. There’s always a bottle of wine. Often two. Sometimes a bourbon to finish. We do it right.
But more often than not, Friday night finds me home alone. And frankly, I love it. As any New Yorker knows, truly quiet alone time is hard to come by in these parts. I’ve claimed Friday as my own, hiding out in my apartment while everyone else is out celebrating the start of the weekend. I find it delicious to eat a bowl of ice-cream in bed, watch an episode of something decidedly not up Chris’s alley on Netflix, and nod off early.
I find this particular Friday night especially precious. After a runaround week and a very busy day– packing and marketing and getting stabbed a few times by the seamstress who’s altering my wedding dress– I was ready to take a load off by the time I came home. I’ll be surrounded by people (albeit people I adore) every minute for the next week. My chance to squeeze in solo time was at hand.
I snuck in some yoga on the roof while the golden hour crept over the Manhattan skyline, chatted with my lovely (and, sadly, soon to be former) next-door-neighbor Becca for a bit, then came downstairs to get some dinner going.
We hit the road for the Outer Banks tomorrow morning, so it’s a clean out kind of a night. Fava beans left over from Chris’s event Tuesday night (seeing as I couldn’t be bothered to pop each bean out of its skin, I steamed them for a few minutes to soften the whole package up– seriously, fava fans, loving these guys doesn’t have to hurt ), crumbled up some terrific raw goats milk feta we picked up last weekend in Philly at the charming Green Aisle Grocery, tossed in the remains of some quinoa cooked in chicken broth I made for dinner when Jasmine was over Tuesday, poured the last of a jar of ramp vinaigrette I’ve had lurking in the fridge for a couple of weeks over the whole thing, then hit it with a healthy pour of fruity olive oil and some fresh cracked pepper.
I sat by the window in the big leather club chair that belonged to my dad and ate. Peacefully. Alone. It doesn’t look like much, and it probably could’ve benefitted from a handful of parsley or some lemon zest. But I didn’t have either on hand, and wasn’t about to go out to buy them. But I’m telling you, it hit the spot. And really, who cares? No one was here but me.