Killing a bird for dinner…

After 2 short days of sunny and warm weather last week, it’s cold and rain has been on and off for the whole week thus far. The temperature is in the high 30s and low 40s, but with humidity, it definitely feels colder.

This is our 4th week in Paris. I somehow feel cold and lack of energy most of the time. I hope I am not coming down with a cold or something…. There are still so many places I want to visit, but I just don’t feel like to go out at all. I stay in the tiny room most of the time this week, "trying" to get online, reading books or simply being a couch potato. Surprisingly, I am getting used to this tiny space. It’s so small; it makes everything so reachable within a step or two. I am afraid that I will get a cultural shock when I go back to the US. Haha

I was thinking what we should have for dinner, so I went to the nearby grocery store to get some ideas. Not being able to read French makes grocery shopping really challenging. I can’t read any labels, and that makes the choice of selections very limited. I basically buy food based on the pictures shown on the packaging. And of course, because of that, we’ve been having pasta, salad, bread and more pasta for the past weeks, and today I really want something other than pasta.

Got in the grocery store, as my routine, I started with the fruit and veggie section. I was just there this Monday, and things haven’t changed much since. So I went from the veggie section to the diary section and my basket was still empty. Whatever items I know, I am kind of tired of eating them; and whatever items I don’t know, they are still foreigners to me and I don’t dare to try them. Then I got to the meat section, I saw some chicken. I decided to make some hearty chicken soup tonight.

So, here is the whole chicken I got. As I pulled it out of the package, I realized that I needed to clean it and cut it open before I could fit it in the cooking pot. I felt like that I was murdering a chicken with a not-so-sharp bread knife….. Why bread knife? That's the only knife we've got in the kitchen. Can you see the tiny kitchen? The chicken in a way looks so big all of a sudden. ☺ The seasonings this kitchen provides are salt and pepper only. So, I threw in some onions to help spice up the soup base. After cooking it for about 3 hours, I hope the soup turns out delicious.