My Oven is Fixed, My Sister is Here, New Books!

First of all, my oven is back! The first time they came to fix it, they didn’t. But two days later (thursday), a couple of guys showed up, replaced my oven door and all is well again. There is still some shattered glass deep inside the oven that my husband couldn’t reach with the shop-vac but there’s not much I can do about that. I baked some cracked wheat bread on Thursday night that turned out really good and some decent sourdough yesterday. The bread disappears fast with four people in the house which brings me to the second part of this post…

My sister and brother-in-law have arrived! I picked them up at the airport on Thursday afternoon. Of course their flight was delayed since we are in Italy and that’s just the way things work. I ended up stuck at the Catania airport for a couple of hours (no air conditioning) and they ended up stuck on the plane in Rome (no air conditioning). I think they had it worse since they were trapped in a confined area and I had the freedom of walking outside to escape the odor (deodorant, while gaining in popularity, is still not widely used here). But they did finally make it and their luggage even arrived at the same time (this only seems to happen about 50 percent of the time here). We’ve been taking things slow since I’ve had lots of homework and they’re still jet-lagged but yesterday we went out exploring and then they had their first Sicilian pizza last night. Today we will hit the big outdoor market in Catania so I should have some good photos to post tonight.

Finally, my latest order from Amazon arrived yesterday and I now have three new books on baking (these arrivals are usually a surprise to my husband!). I’m really excited and stayed up late last night reading and did the same thing when I woke up this mornng. Even though I have a million cookbooks, I don’t have many books dedicated to bread. These are the books I got:

Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes by Jeffrey Hamelman; The Breadbaker’s Apprentice: Mastering the Art of Extraordinary Bread by Peter Reinhardt; The Bread Bible by Rose Levy Berenbaum