Weekend Basics

This weekend we spent much of our time cleaning up the house and prepping for our upcoming week in NYC — surprise, we're here! I'm working in the Etsy offices throughout the week while Tim eats his way through the city and wraps up a couple writing meetings.

Amidst all the planning and packing, we did snap pics of the current progress of all our surviving late summer plants for a couple robust garden roundups we'll share later this week — we've been long overdue for a garden update.

Speaking of urban gardens, we came across an amazing secret pocketed container garden in the alleys behind the intersection of Stuart Avenue and Robinson Street:

We were so blown away and inspired by all the container plants growing in this back alley. We'd never seen so many varieties of contained fruit trees in our area and it definitely made us want to add a few to our own collection moving forward! Tim and I always laugh about how we always seem to see something new with each walk we take through the neighborhood. Here we've been living in this area almost 2 years and never knew about this little pocket of urban garden goodness — definitely a fun back alley to walk through and look at if you are in the area!

Saturday morning Tim put a big pot of stew in the crockpot — it's a recipe from Kendra Bailey Morris' The Southern Slow Cooker:

You might remember we attended her book launch event a couple weekends ago, so were eager to try one of the recipes. We enjoyed a couple warm bowls that evening before calling it a night since we'd have an early rise for heading up to NYC. Look out for the recipe and a book giveaway coming up on E.A.T. this week.

Sunday we hit the road at 3:30am to head into the city. Yes, we are crazy, but there is a method to our madness. We've found traveling this early provides the clearest roads with the least amount of traffic and lands us in the city just before 10am when the city is still just waking up for brunch. We could probably write an entire book on the ins and outs of traveling to and from VA to NYC and this method proves best when making it a drive.

We have posts from home lined up this week for the blog and will share a roundup of our time in the city once we're back. We've got three things on the bucket list for this trip — Cronuts, Rooftop drinks and the East River Ferry. We'll let you know how we fare!

P.S. Friday at 11:27pm we waited and watched in the East sky, trying to get a glimpse of the NASA LADEE rocket our local news station promised we might see the trail of as it launched out of VA Beach. We never saw the trail, but enjoyed the pics from those that did the next morning. Did you see it?