Long and rambly post about el horno

Anyone who knows us knows that Zachariah is the "better" cook. Better is in quotes just to make me feel better, like for some reason he's not really better, but we say he is. But he is. Okay, I can cook fine, and I can whip up a mouth-watering meal now and then, but Z really enjoys it, and MAN, can he cook! But the point of this post is that...WE HAVE AN OVEN!!!

Our house had an oven when we got here in July, and it worked for all of, um...let me count...okay, half a meal. We had a semi-heated Shepherd's Pie that night. Luckily, the ingredients in Shepherd's Pies are already all cooked, you just bake it to mesh everything together a little more. Since then, our oven just did not work at all. Once or twice it would look like it was turning on, but oh! such a tease! Thank goodness a wise and handsome Santa Claus brought me a toaster oven last Christmas, so we could still make a few essentials, like mini-pans of brownies, toasty sandwiches, etc. But a whole oven would have been nice.

Uruguay is not quite as "mañana" as other places, but it still took until last week to get our oven working. Yep, August through November, no oven. Rafael, our landlord, came and looked at it. He said he'd send someone. That guy came and looked at it. He said he had to talk to Rafael. Rafael sent him back to look some more. The guy managed to knock out all the power in our house, but didn't fix the oven. He said he'd come back later and fix the power. Heh. Totally ditched. The embassy dispatched several different fellows to fix our power. Finally, someone figured it out. The next couple of weeks brought us Leonardo and José, who looked at the oven, then left. They returned and left again, this time with the oven! Progress?

Unfortunately, giving up the oven in hopes of it being fixed left us with a big, dark, gaping hole in the kitchen. You already know my feelings about roaches. This big hole did not help in that department. Coming into the kitchen from one way, you have to walk verrrry close to the big oven-hole. I got the heebie-jeebies every single time, which wasn't very often, because wisely I avoided that route. BUT, when you stand at the fridge (a favorite place of mine), there you are! Smack next to the hole. I consider myself amazingly blessed to have not had a juvie roach take a dare and leap out at me during those long weeks. I asked Z to clean it out, because there were all these burned things left in the hole, and various other foody-looking items. He never did it. And this is not to bag on him, because I'm sure he meant to, but I had to conquer my disgust and reach in and clean and scrub all by myself. (Pausing for the applause to die down.) Then I sprinkled bay leaves in it. Take that, roaches...

Wow, this is way longer than I meant it to be. Anyone ever notice I'm a rambler? If I've ever left you a phone message, you already know... What I'm trying to say is: We finally have our oven back! And while I didn't miss it all that much while it was gone, we have made several batches of oatmeal-chocolate chip cookies and also gingerbread cookies in the week we've been reunited, and I now cannot imagine how in the world we survived without it. Oven = Yummy Cookies. Oh, and cornbread....mmmm...