My very good friend Sara came over yesterday. She’s also self-employed at the moment, having recently left her life as a full-time nanny to spend more time pursuing her acting career. Sara and I are both in the sketch comedy group, Harvard Sailing Team. She lives pretty close to my apartment, so we decided to meet up for some lunch.

As I continue to learn to cook, I decided to make chicken soup from scratch – for the first time ever! – and it was very good.

I basically just browned some chicken with olive oil in a big pot, adding a bit of garlic salt. Then I added about 12 cups of water and 8 or 9 chicken boullion cubes, and brought it to a boil. I coarsely chopped up a bunch of veggies: a large onion, three small potatoes, a bunch of peeled carrots, about two cups of butternut squash (pre-cut by Trader Joe’s), four or five stalks of celery and half a leek. I added the veggies to the boiling stock and kept it boiling for about 20 minutes, until the veggies were fork-tender.

I served it with some whole wheat hamburger buns that we needed to use up, which I toasted, buttered and garlic’d. Sara, Kevin and I all really enjoyed the soup. It was warm and hearty.

While I made the simple soup, Sara put together some pumpkin chocolate chip brownies I was planning to bake. She did a great job and they turned out very tasty.

Although, we both agreed that they could use more pumpkin. This particular recipe only called for a half cup. I found the recipe here, but if you like pumpkin in your sweets, I would look for a recipe that uses at least a cup of the stuff.

While the brownies were baking, I popped into the oven alongside them a single tray of carrot coconut cupcakes. I had frozen batter leftover from the Susan Woo event that Fanny & Jane sponsored last month and I knew I had to use it up pretty soon. I wasn’t sure how they’d taste, but they were delicious and yummy, as though I’d just  made the batter! Score.

After we finished up lunch, and spent some time chatting on my front stoop over coffee, two of our other best friends, Billy and Adam (who are also self-employed, make up a comedy rap duo called Snakes, AND are members of Harvard Sailing Team), showed up to join the quickly growing party. Then Sara’s boyfriend George stopped by after his work day was over (he does have a “normal” job) and we all spent a nice evening laughing, talking, playing games, eating pizza and drinking beer. And finally, around 9pm, we headed into Manhattan to see Kevin perform in an improv show, and THEN (phew!) we went to see a “secret” Comedy Central showcase. It was a fun, long, late night and I don’t think I went to sleep until close to 4am. Yikes.

All in all, yesterday was another wonderful post-desk-job / pre-self-job vacation day. At one point, Billy and Adam were making fun of me for drinking beer on a Thursday afternoon, when on this day last month I was up to my eyeballs in data entry, and I said to them, “Wait, it’s Thursday?” and we had a big ol’ laugh about it all. This change of pace is really nice right now. I’m sure you’ve gathered that I’m enjoying it. I think I’ve said so about three dozen times.

Many of my friends are self-employed at the moment and it’s awesome. It’s inspiring and exciting to see people choosing to make money in ways that make them happy, rather than in ways that are more approved-of by society. It might be a situation that is unique to this particular time in our lives, or to living in this particular city, or to not having many financial obligations besides paying our rent and feeding ourselves, but whatever the circumstances, it’s pretty great so far.

I’m excited to see what next week will bring!