Finding Food

So far, one of the biggest challenges if finding food for us. Now it isn't that you would starve to death here; there are many bakeries, snack shops, fry stands, and cafes. But obviously, we need to cook and within a reasonable budget. And the Dutch really don't cook. For example, many stores do not have things like flour, sugar, baking soda, and baking powder. We have found very small (like 4 cup) bags of white flour and small bags of sugar (mostly for putting in your coffee and tea). I asked another expat over the internet about baking soda and baking powder, and you have to go to the speciality Asian markets, and vanilla extract does not exist at all or is outragously expensive in expat stores. The grocery stores also do not have things like dried beans, peas, or chicken stock. For the dried goods we are hoping the Asian stores can also help.

Of course, in many ways, the flour and sugar are moot points, since we don't have an oven to cook them in! It turns out we do have a microwave oven. After recently locating the English manual on the internet, we are hopefully that there maybe some baking potenial under the 'forced air' option, but not too hopefully.

What have we been eating...well, a lot of bread. Sort of mid grade sandwhich bread. Not as bad a whole wheat wonderbread, but not as dense as an american artisean loaf. And it is all sandwhich loaf shapped, no french bread, fococcia, etc. The dutch eat for breakfast bread with jam and hard boiled eggs. For lunch a cold sandwhich with maybe an appel or banaan (slip a little Ukkie learned Dutch in there for you!). Dinner is a bit of a mystery to us. Probably broiled meat with some sort of gravy (given that there are two gravy boats in our tiny kitchen!), bread with butter, perhaps some veggies. There also appears to be a lot of 'reheating' of frozen foods and deli foods. I surmise from all of the stands, that the dutch do not starve on this meager diet because they augment with 'snacks' - french friends, little fried 'krokets', asian egg rolls.

We were hopefully yesterday that a journey across Cetrum (Utrecht city center) to a different brand grocery store would provide us with such staples as beans, flour, etc. We were extremely dissappointed to find nothing of the sort. Although we did find a larger AH (the store nearby where we live) that did contain more products. We left with nearly enough food for three dinners (although no milk, eggs, or cheese because we could not fit them in our bags back home).

No oven and no baking supplies is a huge blow to me. I had thought that baking would be something that I would be able to retreat to in a strange place. If it was just the oven, we could over come that with a toaster oven. But the lack of staples, well, you can't bake much if you cannot find the ingredients in stores.

Our one refuge may be stirfry. There is rice, and assorted veggies, and a lot of indoneasean sauces. Last night we had chicken and green bean stirfry with a bottle of sauce we randomly picked. It was a welcome respite from the pasta and bread. This morning we changed up breakfast with some yogurt and 'granola.' And we found some sort of hot cereal (but I may have bought baby food! we'll see).

We are still searching for things, we only left Maine a week ago today! Hard to believe. But since we are basically limited to a cooktop (theoretically you can cook meat in the Bauknecht, be we aren't ready to attempt yet), we had hoped to find the basic things to make soups and stews (beans, stock, etc) and we think if we get a waffle iron and can find some decent whole wheat flour, we can make waffles a lot.

I'm sorry I ever said a bad word about Food City in Wilton, Maine!