Bread bowls and apple pie

This week it has been raining a lot.  On Wednesday I though I had soup and bread left at the Sede, only to discover (when I went to go eat it) that I didn't.  And it was pouring.  Although at least I had an umbrella and a raincoat, which was a step up from the day before, when I ran to the fornaio (bakery) in the pouring rain with neither, and gave in and bought an umbrella on the way back.  So I wandered out into the rain with vague thoughts of going to the Greek place someone discovered last week, only I couldn't remember exactly where it was.  Before I found it, though, I passed a tiny little place (all the lunch places in florence are tiny) advertising stew and a sandwich for a reasonable price.  I love stew.  Especially when it's raining.  So I ducked inside, added my umbrella to the pile at the door, and ordered.  I was very happily surprised to discover that they were using the word panino, which can mean either sandwich or the roll you make a sandwich with, to mean BREAD BOWL!!!  The only thing I adore more than stew is stew in a bread bowl.  So I was very happy.  Also, there was no surcharge to perch on a stool at the little counter by the front window, so I did, and wound up chatting (in Italian!) with a woman who was sitting next to me who, it turned out, lives near Vallombrosa, which is a beautiful wooded area with an abbey in the mountains that I've been wanting to visit.  We talked about Florence, and about the U.S. health system and how Obama's trying to change it, and how the Italian health system works.  Part-way through she asked me what I really liked about Florence, and I meant to tell her the bells--you can hear church bells ringing from almost anywhere in Tuscany, whether you're in the center of the city or up on top of a mountain where you can't hear anything but the wind--and bells.  Except that I told her I liked i campanelli--the doorbells.  The word I was looking for is campanili, which means bell towers.  That was entertaining...  She also asked me what I really, really disliked about Florence--and that was surprisingly difficult.  I mean, I know there are (must be?) things I don't like about Florence, but in the moment I couldn't come up with anything except that the University is completely disorganized, which, at least for the moment is mildly frustrating and entertaining, but not something I really strongly dislike.  All in all it turned into a lovely lunch on a rainy day.  And she left me her number, so that if I wind up going to Vallombrosa, I can call her, and she'll show me around.

Tonight Emilia isn't home, so Caitlin and Sofi and I invited (with Emilia's permission--actually, it was her idea) some of the other smithies over to watch Love Actually and eat apple pie.  The latter is currently in the oven

In fact, the timer just rang.  Hang on.

So, after I got the pie out of the oven, I remembered that I'd completely forgotten about my tea in the microwave (the reason it was in the microwave in the first place was that I forgot about it after I put the tea bag in and it got cold)--and that was more alarming that you might think.  See, this microwave is unique in that none of the buttons work.  When you shut the door, it's on.  And when you open the door, it's off.  So if you forget to take something out, it just keeps on heating indefinitely.  It also means you have to remember not to shut the door when you're done.  And 21 years of shutting the door after you take something out of the microwave, as Caitlin put it, is a hard habit to break.

Anyway.  After getting the pie out of the oven and my tea out of the microwave, it was time to start getting dinner ready.  Tonight that just meant reheating chicken, potatoes, and various side dishes.  Since the oven was still hot, we put the potatoes and sides in the oven, and the chicken in the microwave.  About ten minutes later, the potatoes were only mildly warm, so Caitlin turned the oven back on.  Except there are two knobs (like most ovens--one with temperature and one for "on"), and she  didn't realize I'd turned the temperature back down to zero after I took the pie out, and the oven, unlike the microwave, does not turn on automatically when you shut the door.  So ten minutes later, the potatoes were still only luke warm, at which point we caught on to the temperature issue, and turned it back up.  By then, though, the chicken had been sitting on the table for twenty minutes and was cold.  So it went back in the microwave.  By the time we got everything reasonably hot at the same time, it was quarter of nine (the goal was to eat at 8).  Clearly we fail at reheating dinner.