Roasting chicken or How I managed to not burn down the apartment

[Written on Tuesday, Feb. 17 – first full day in the new apartment.]

Well, I just survived my first experience 1) roasting chicken, 2) in a gas oven, 3) in Celsius, 4) without oven mitts, 5) in a steamy hot kitchen. Most of you know that I am not a chef. I can bake, I can follow a recipe, but when it comes to cooking meat, I am terrified of undercooking. Eric has eaten his share of dry chicken, and he also cooks 90% of the time or more.

Today, the main day of Carnival (or Mardi Gras, if you’re Katie or Sarah G.), we are without Internet access and Eric had a couple of meetings he needed to attend. Our gracious friends, Tricia and Michael (the missionaries from a few weeks ago), were kind enough to allow him to come over for a couple of hours to use their wifi. During that time, I planned to work on unpacking in the new place, do some cleaning, and, most pertinent to this post, roast some chicken legs in a lovely rosemary sauce. My mom is wondering who I am right now, I know.

It started out easy enough. Put chicken in pyrex with olive oil. Check. Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Hmm…why does this oven only go up to 250 degrees? Okay, convert to Celsius. Check. After the 40 minutes called for in the recipe (read: on the prepackaged sauce label), the apartment was smelling good and I thought I was actually going to pull this off. But wait! Chicken should be golden after 40 minutes? It still looks raw!!! Since I do not have the experience in the kitchen to know about how much longer it would need to get “golden” in a 200 degree C oven, I did my usual set-a-timer-for-five-minutes-then-check routine. And repeated. And repeated. Okay…10 min this time. Still nothing.

After a good 90 min or so, I finally used a hand towel as an oven mitt, unsteadily lifted this dish out of the oven one handed, and somehow miraculously managed not to burn myself or light the hand towel on fire on the flame in the oven. [Aside: This gas cooking stuff really freaks me out. I know it’s easier to control and blah blah blah, but at the end of the day, you’re cooking over a fire like a caveman. It’s scary and I don’t like it.] I did what any woman of our generation would do and promptly sent a picture of the chicken both to my mom and to Eric, asking them both if it looked “golden.” I got an “eww. I don’t do chicken” from my mom – see, I come from a long line of female chicken chefs – and a “meh?” from Eric.

Actually, Eric was bit more helpful. I followed his suggestion, turned the oven up a random number of Celsius degrees (I mean, it doesn’t really mean anything if it’s not in Fahrenheit anyway, right?), left it for 10 min, then said screw it and poured in the sauce. Ten minutes later, I don’t know if the juices were running clear as called for by the recipe, but when I butchered a couple of the legs (just really tore them apart…no points for presentation here!), I was pretty sure they were about perfect! I texted Eric: “either I did it right or we’ll get salmonella.” Should be a good night.***

Meanwhile, I wiped out the closets and drawers in the bedroom and unpacked some of our clothes. Now…I apologize in advance if this is an overshare, but while I was sick I got extremely dehydrated, so naturally the doctors were pumping me full of saline for five days in the hospital. I learned quickly that the human body decides to hold onto as much of that water as it can since it’s pretty sure you’re trying to kill it by dehydrating it. Either that or the salt causes you to retain the water? I don’t know the science behind it, but I do know that I gained about 10 pounds of pure water in a couple of days. My whole body puffed up. I would show pictures, but well, first of all I’m just plain embarrassed, and secondly, you already know what cankles look like. It’s amazing. When I rolled over in bed, I could feel the water slosh to the other side of my body. If I stood up after lying on one side, you could see that there was more weight on one side of my body than the other. Eric thinks this is hilarious. I think it’s uncomfortable and really really weird.

Why did I tell you this right after the chicken story? Well, I’m finding that a couple of days out of the hospital, after several hours of cooking, cleaning, and unpacking, I have to lie down and put my feet up like a pregnant woman b/c the lower half of my body feels too heavy and full of water. It is the most bizarre thing ever. And for those of you who constantly wonder if a newlywed who says she feels bloated or nauseous is pregnant, I’ll go ahead and spell it out for you. NOT pregnant. Calm it down.

***For the record, the chicken was AMAZING! Absolutely perfect, and went well with the rice. I also used the extra sauce on potatoes the next day for lunch, and those were also phenomenal. If you happen to find Red Fork Rosemary Chicken Seasoning Sauce (with roasted garlic, lemon and white wine), you have to try it. Amazing.

The Yacht Club or I’m so fancy

Now for the reveal of the new apartment! It’s absolutely incredible. I’m sure I will never again have the opportunity to live in such a beautiful apartment with such a spectacular view in a really vibrant and fun city. I’ll go ahead and say that this is going to sound like bragging…I guess that’s what I’m doing, but I also am trying to keep everyone updated on our whole trip…anyway, please forgive me. Or skip this post. Either way, you’re all welcome to come down and stay with us in this amazing place!

You may remember that our old building was called Bonanza. I couldn’t get over the name. It just cracked me up! This new place is called the Yacht Club. It is a fifty-something story building right on Avenida Balboa (as close to the water and walking paths as you can get). It is gorgeous. I admit that I lusted over it last year when we were here, but I never imagined we’d live here. The idea of the building is that it’s shaped like a boat (a yacht, I suppose, but gosh how pretentious does that sound?!) with the bow (I’ve been told not to call it the “front of the boat”) pointing towards the ocean. We are on the 44th floor in the apartment with the bow-shaped balcony.

The views from this place are indescribable in words, so I’ve taken a ton of pictures already. It’s a weird shaped apartment, since the sides and main dividing wall between living and sleeping areas are curved, so it might be hard to figure out where everything is, even with the pictures…but here you go anyway.

Looking back towards the living room/dining area/kitchen/front door from the front windows that face the ocean.

Master bath. Yes, there’s a balcony directly behind the tub.

Guest bedroom/Eric’s office. It needs visitors!!!

Can you tell that the walls are curved? The whole building is curved like a ship would be. So cool.

Looking out at the point (the bow of the “yacht”) of our balcony towards the ocean.

kitchen and front door. Pardon the mess.

Everyone needs a giant gaudy gold mirror and some dead palm leaf type things.

Master bedroom with private balcony.

Guest bedroom! It’s calling your name!!!! It has its own balcony.

The living room, taken from nearish the dining room table, facing the balcony.

The day I originally wrote this post – Monday, Jan. 16, I believe – I was resting a lot in bed. But every time I get up and walk out to the “Grand Room,” as I silently called it that day – the kitchen/dining room/living room/balcony area with all the windows – I felt absolutely overwhelmed at the beauty of these views. I still do. I want to say that I feel so blessed, but I can’t decide if that word bothers me in this instance because it sounds cliche, especially for a southern girl, or because I feel guilty for living in such luxury…even just on this first day. This is so much more than we need, and a huge change from where we were living just last night.

A few little details are fun for me: First, I am in love with the elephant painting! I really want to blow up a print of this photo of it when we get back to NC and put it on a wall.

Secondly, I love the accent wall color. This one is for my Tar Heels…Becca, listen up. 🙂 When we met with the owner of the apartment to sign papers, she asked what color would be good for the wall. Eric immediately suggested Carolina Blue! As it turns out, the owner’s father-in-law is a UNC alumnus! Amazing! Anyway, she did paint the wall an almost Carolina Blue, but it turned out to be too bright and tacky, so she changed it to this. I’m okay with that – it looks beautiful. If I want my fave shade of blue, all I have to do is turn my head the other way and look out the wall of windows at the Carolina Blue sky!

Now for the best part…the views! Our building is one of the taller ones on Avenida Balboa, and we are maybe 10 floors from the top. You can see in the photo below that the balconies at the top are split – they don’t have the pointed part in the front. Ours is the highest balcony that has the pointed part, if that makes sense.

We are the top balcony out of the ones that have the point in the front.

So maybe you can tell a little from the photo above…our balcony starts at the front of our living room at the point (bow of the ship facing the ocean) and extends down the right side (in the photo) past the living room, the guest room, the master bedroom, and the master bath. On the other side of the living room, the whole wall is windows, most of which we keep open all day and night for the breeze. We haven’t used air conditioning at all except for the very first day we moved in when I wasn’t feeling well.

From here we can see nearly the whole coastline of the city, from Trump Tower in the northeast down to the old city, the long causeway that leads to three islands (Amador Causeway), and the entrance to the Canal. There are always tons of ships lined up and waiting their turn to go through the Canal. It’s incredible.

The giant windows that we leave open all the time.

Facing southwest towards the Canal, the Amador Causeway, and the old city (Casco Viejo)

The Islands at the end of Amador Causeway, a bit of the Cinta Costera (Coastal Beltway – the round road on the right), and maybe you can see some of the boats lined up waiting to go into the Canal.