New Years Eve (cheese?) Toasts

Tonight for dinner, we were grateful for Nana throwing in the dried split pea soup. We really wanted cheese toasts to go along with it (and some red wine where we broke one cheap cork screw and then used the only other already broken one in the house!). The cheese toasts required mastering to some level the dutch oven. Simple, you say, turn it on and go. This is no simple oven - it has a control panel to counter a fighter jet and turns out to also be a microwave; we discovered from the helpful blue arcing sparks to the tin foil. We managed to sort of melt the cheese, at least heat the bread, and not burn the house down (which was so thoughtfully already damp from this mornings dousing).

Dinner was very nice, especially since Jake biked to a baby store and home with a booster seat for Elena. Ironically the red wine in our 'welcome' basket was an 'acceptable' red table wine from California. I guess it goes with the split pea soup from Maine.

Elena is getting ready for bed right now. We have figured out the dish washer, clothes washer, and dryer. The oven is by far the most complicated and has the only manual all in Dutch (but the pictures are pretty).

Jake found a sweet shop just around the corner and brought home two adorable and quite tasty looking cupcakes for dessert tonight. We'll toast our new life in The Netherlands and listen to the Dutch set off a veritable arsenal of smuggled fireworks in the park across the street.