Today's pic is a window on the Beurs Plein, that square between the Beurs and the Bijenkorf:

To begin the day, coffee and pastries with Hans and Rina. The pastries are from that place on the corner of Korte Lijnbaanssteeg and the Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal that had the excellent eclairs in 2001 but I banished for life in 2004 for 1) no longer having the eclairs, 2) shortchanging me, and 3) giving me attitude when I called them on the shortchanging. Actually, I could have forgiven all those things, but there was a final charge: the croissants weren't any good.

However, since the pastries that Rina served this morning are so good, this puts me in the position of cutting off my taste buds to spite the bakery. Forgiveness is under consideration.

Nalbandian vs. Hanescu, who takes the first set 6-3. Nalbandian takes the second set in long rallies that are really exciting to watch, but I have to run out to try to catch Ed and Margot at the Spuiplein since it did not occur to me last week to take them a little something to celebrate the birth of the new kid.

Ed and Margot are not there, but this is not really a surprise since I know they don't play the Spuiplein every Sunday. I am disappointed again by the absence of Wil Wiegant, who had the really great postcards of his work last year, but luckily this time there is a woman named Marijke van der Zwaag with postcards of her excellent drawings of plants for only €0,80. Also, she and another customer enjoy my comment that it is much better to send one of these back to San Francisco than a picture of a canal boat. See, it doesn't matter so much that you're fracturing the language if you're saying something nice.

Mr. Fixit's project this visit is to repair the silverware/utensils drawer. The right back end of it has come unglued, and the drawer is literally falling apart so that it's a trap waiting for the first incautious tenant to open it a little too fast and utterly destroy it. Rina and I cannot find the clamps that Hans must at one point have had to make frames for his paintings, so together we slather the composition-wood mitered joint with glue and the wrap the drawer front-to-back and side-to-side with heavy elastic from her costuming supplies. It works.

For supper, I'm cooking Italian Butter Beans for Rina and Hans, so I stop at Albert Heijn for tomatoes and spinach. (I brought Iacopi's dried beans from California.)

The tomatoes are dreadful, but I have no choice since I'm determined to make the dish. I really should use canned tomatoes, but I don't know enough about local brands to buy the right ones here.

On the other hand, the spinach provides one of those happy caveat emptor moments that you can experience in markets everywhere. I examine a 300 gr. bag of house brand spinach leaves. It's bit expensive at €1,49 but I know without looking that that bin of loose leaves over there will be way too expensive to use in beans. And then I look more closely. The bagged stuff is showing its age, and the occasional rotten leaf is visible. The loose stuff is gorgeous, every leaf prettier than its neighbor. But wait, what's that sign saying? €0,69 for 500 grams? How can it be that loose spinach leaves so beautiful there's no point in picking through them are about half the price of rotting bagged spinach? And at a very good price, too, by SF standards.

Rina's doing a salad to go with the beans, and I try cooking cornbread again. It's my third try, and the first that actually comes out completely right. The first was way underdone, the second wasn't quite right, but this one is finally good enough that both Hans and Rina have seconds.

However, cooking it is a nightmare. Rina has this state of the art Miele oven that will supposedly do everything. I mean you can set the damn thing so that the upper heat source is on, the lower is on, or both are on, all with or without the convection fan.

The only problem is that we cannot seem to make it get any hotter than 190 C if only the lower heating element is on. And Rina goes on about how the recipes in the official Miele recipe book routinely have you changing the cooking mode and temperature during the middle of the cooking period. I come right back that grandmother had her hands full adding wood during the cooking period, and I don't want to have to change the way I cook cornbread in order to fit the eccentricities of this damn oven.

And then I flash on my sordid software career, when Oracle Applications first started competing with those of SAP. A serious selling point we made was that SAP forced the user to change his way of doing business to fit the new software...just as this German oven is forcing me to change the way I make cornbread. Hmmmmm, and yes, my Volkswagen forced me to change the way I drove, too. Is there a pattern here?

At any rate, I ended up heating the oven to the correct temperature with both burners on, sticking the cornbread in, changing the setting so that only the lower burner was on, and after the temperature had dropped slowly to 190, we turned the upper burner on for a while. And then switched it off and then back on again, and so in this manner managed to get the cornbread cooked all the way through without burning it on top. Whew.

But it worked.