It’s beginning to dawn on me, that Saturday is the only day that I get full possession of my life.
I wake up anytime I want and have ditched setting alarms. If I wake up at noon, then so be it (I never do). I do a quick check of the phone charging overnight on my bedside table. If it’s nothing urgent, I just leave it there. I avoid reacting to the news. If a comet had crashed into the earth in the middle of the night, there’s nothing we could have done. We’ll get painlessly pulverised in our sleep hopefully, and be mercifully eternally bound in whatever dreams we’re in.
Coffee. Then another coffee. A great bowel movement. Shower. I put on my face- serum, moisturiser, sunscreen if we needed to go out somewhere. Unlike weekdays where I don’t eat any breakfast, we either eat out or have some old favourites like Spam and rice, pancakes, a well-buttered toast.
Then it’s chores. The week’s laundry in batches; coloreds, whites and delicates. There is some sort of weird comfort in the washing cycle- wash, soak, rinse, spin. I love doing laundry because it echoes life. I’m perpetually organising my clothes, my shoes. I think of the week ahead and mentally put together outfits. I feel that I have too much. I also feel that I never seem to have enough.
I think about dinner because more than likely, there is something that I’d like to eat, something I’d like to cook that I’ve been planning for the whole week.
For this Saturday, it’s a simple roast chicken but done the way this restaurant in Paris does it. They only use a small portion of the breast and serve it with a hefty shaving of black truffles and bearnaise sauce.
I won’t be putting shaved truffles on it, but I was thinking of making bearnaise sauce (you can check out a YouTube video of how Le Clarence makes its roast chicken here).
But by midday, I’d changed my mind about the bearnaise sauce; we had gone to the Asian store, but I had completely forgotten to get white wine vinegar and shallots. Maybe some other time then.
The only thing unusual with the way the restaurant roasts its chicken is that it’s placed inside a dutch casserole and then placed in the oven; it’s then taken out at regular intervals where it’s basted with its own juices. Towards the end when it has browned, you put in butter, garlic cloves and fresh rosemary, basting it again over and over until it’s done.
This forces me to always check the clock.
The done part was about 45 minutes more than the usual way I roast chicken. I make a salad out of leftover romaine lettuce. I’ve taken out buns from the freezer and defrosted them. I make a normal gravy with chicken cubes and buttered roux. We start to eat at 6:15 pm, later than usual, but in the middle of summer, it feels more like noon.
The chicken is much more noticeable moist than usual though. It’s delicious actually though I detect a hint of bitterness from the rosemary; perhaps I put too much.
What next? I feel like doing something and automatically, I try to look for the time. It’s always, do I have enough time??
I stop myself and make a drink (gin and tonic, which I don’t normally do) instead.
