Kitchen cunctation

On Friday Danny and I were in the midst of making our familiar round of Fidenza supermarkets (Aldi has good cheap yogurt, Conad has bread we like and guinea hens, Lidl has some succulents in ceramic pots we might want to invest in) when my phone rang. It was Pam, reporting on a call she'd gotten from Ikea. (When we put in our order for the kitchen, we'd given them her number.)

An early draft of our kitchen plan

There were a couple of problems, Ikea had told her. They didn't have in stock the butcher-block counter that is supposed to run all along one side of the kitchen. And second, they can't deliver the kitchen, with or without the counter, on April 9, as originally promised. The soonest they can do it is April 16, without the counter, and maybe a week or two later with. So, Pam asked us, what did we want to do? Ikea was calling her back in an hour to hear our decision.

Danny's first reaction was, predictably, to declare that we were going to cancel the whole order and buy our kitchen somewhere else. We bought the groceries we had in our cart and headed back home, where Pam and her cellphone were going to meet us so we could be there when the Ikea call-back came.

As I expected, based on nearly 50 years' experience with Danny's moods, he mellowed somewhat once he had digested the initial disappointment of yet another plan gone awry. When Ikea called back, Danny decided we wouldn't cancel the order after all. Instead, we're going to take delivery of most of our new kitchen on April 16 (we hope) and pray that the counter turns up before we go back to California at the end of the month.

We took Pam out to lunch at Trattoria San Giorgio to thank her for enduring all this. We knew from our previous visit that as lunchtime goes on they run out of popular dishes; this time we got there early enough that there was still some horse tartare on hand, so I got a plateful. It is full of iron and minerals and a good antidote to things not going the way you want.

The pizzeria is known as Da Vito. I think that's Vito behind the counter.

Then yesterday we consoled ourselves further by buying a sensational tablecloth at the Saturday street market (a steal at 8 euros) and, later today, getting take-out pizza from Pizzeria dello Studente (The Student's Pizzera) a few blocks away. It's a very popular place and quite the scene on a Saturday night.

How gorgeous is this tablecloth?

We got a Sicilian (with capers, anchovies, and black olives) and a tuna-and-onion pie. They were cheap and good. Not the best in town, but this dinner cheered me up considerably.