The Day has come.

This morning I waited anxiously in my kitchen, awaiting the arrival of the delivery truck that would bring my newfound food freedom. I was nervous because they had forgotten to put the "B" after our house number, meaning they would be ringing my neighbor's bell. I called them and they assured me they had changed it in the computer.

So when I heard the tell tell sound of a diesel on our otherwise quiet street and saw the top of the truck through my window, I knew IT had arrived.

I made Dan rush downstairs to make sure the guys knew to bring it to us before I had to jump out the window onto their truck to prevent them from driving away with my oven (and as is usually the case with Dutch customer service, they had in fact NOT changed our address in the computer and the guys were in the process of calling someone to find out if there was a mistake). They brought up our new oven, much more efficiently than we could've ever gotten it up ourselves, and placed it in our house.  I then went to work on cleaning it and polishing up the steel. When all was said and done, I had a beautiful, new working oven in my kitchen/dining room.

Now, since most "ovens" (and by that I mean a microwave/oven combo,the size of a microwave) are built into the cabinet, ours has found a new home between our kitchen and dining room.

So what's a girl to do when she lives in a foreign country and has a brand new oven? Bake American style chocolate chip cookies of course!!!  So I set out to the store in search of a mixing bowl, vanilla, and white flour. Mixing bowl was easy, white flour was easy (although do you know that I had to get the flour at the Organic store because the grocery store by my house only carries flour that has a leavening agent in it? hence why they don't use baking soda). Finding the vanilla was a bit more difficult.  I went to three different stores in search of it. In store number one I got a weird look when asking about it but I'm pretty sure the girl did not speak much English. The second store I found "vanilla sugar" packets, in the baking section and no liquid vanilla anywhere.

As a sidenote, the grocery store is where I get the most frustrated with the cultural differences between here and back home. I often wonder around lost, frustrated and on the verge of tears. Such was the case today.

Store number three, the organic store. I asked a worker who has been helpful to me in the past and he said they did not sell liquid vanilla and didn't know where else I could find it. However, they did sell powdered vanilla. I had never heard of such a thing! But I got it, googled it, and found that 1heaping teaspoon of it is  equivalent to 1 teaspoon of liquid vanilla extract. I rushed into the kitchen to begin my new adventure.

The new mixing bowl with the dry ingredients (note the dark brown powder--vanilla)

This is the tiny tube the vanilla comes in. While it may be equivalent in potency, the prices are not. This cost 2.75euros, which is $3.80 for about 2 teaspoons. Send Vanilla please. :)

"Softening" (I prefer melting) the butter. Be thankful you guys have microwaves.

Adding the chocolate chips,which naturally includes tasting the batter.

The dough is on the silpat.I brought it from home. As you can see, it doesn't quite fit the smaller cookie sheet that they have here. I have seen smaller silpats around so I will be on the lookout for one of those. They really are an amazing baking tool.

 Cookies are in the oven. Note how not wide it is. This is large by Dutch  standards. We had two requirements when picking out an oven; must be able to fit a cookie sheet and must be able to fit a turkey. Ours accomplished both.

The great thing about our oven is that is has multiple heat settings. It can be a convection oven as well as a conventional oven. These cookies cooked in less than 5 minutes on the convection setting. It was great!!!

And Voila! The finished product!!  They taste as good as they look!!