How to make Chocolate Chip Cookies in Australia
Tonight my flatmate Elena and I decided to make chocolate chip cookies since she's never made them before and apparently they don't have them in Spain. So since our oven was broken Marcus let us use his oven in Unit 4 to do our baking, and since we were in his place baking already we just brought all of our stuff over there and made it in his kitchen.They turned out ok, our ovens are these weird things, where the microwave is actually the oven, that is to say that it has a heating coil of sorts in the top and can be used as a convection oven. But it seems that the oven works differently than the usual ovens that I'm used to so instead of turning the cookies brown, they stayed yellow but were still baked through.
So, as Elena was taking our second batch of cookies off the tray and putting them onto a plate I saw it... a huge brown spider skitter across the kitchen floor from underneath the fridge and out into the open. I told Elena, who immediately got up on one of the kitchen stools and yelped. She ended up calling to Marcus who we thought was in his room (in both English and German) but after several minutes of calling we switched to calling Junior (I don't know his real name, he's from France). I ended up going there and asking him what we should do about the spider. A few minutes later Junior came down and kicked the spider, it ended up against the front door and appeared to be dead; he then went back to his room.
Then Kelly came to see how the cookies were doing and we told her about the spider, she was like, "What?" and we showed her as she walked up to the door, she thought it was huge too. Then Craig (our landlord's brother) came to see what the fuss was about and started batting at it with a towel to see if it was really dead, it didn't move. He said it was a huntsman spider, there are pics on Google if you do an image search and I'd post one here but I'm just too freaked out at the moment to even look at one of those things for more than a minute. At this point Kelly went to get her camera, and Elena and I went back to making cookies. But when Kelly came back the spider was gone! Oh we searched everywhere for it, but the only places it could have gone were either into the wall or into Marcus' room. We carefully searched a bit of Marcus' room, but since he wasn't there we didn't want to go too far in; instead, I just shook the curtains a bit that were by the door... nothing. So we decided to leave the boys a note.
Kelly wrote it so eloquently don't you think? We stuck it do their door so they could read it when they got home.By this time Troy was back from playing beach volleyball, and was laughing with the rest of us at where a spider that size could have run to. So there we were, Troy, Marcus, Elena, Junior and Johann standing around the kitchen island talking and laughing about the spider, when I saw it... a MOUSE!! A mouse scurried out into the hallway and... back into Marcus' room! Everyone thought I was joking. So we went into Marcus' room, this time since he was here we could search a little better. We shook the shelves a bit, and then Marcus took his shoes out from under the bed and tossed them to see if the mouse had gone into there, nothing. Then Elena came to watch and we decided to move the bed away from the wall to see if it had gone under there, again nothing. Then Elena shrieked and said she saw something moving from underneath the curtains and that we should shake them a bit. So that's what Marcus did, and the mouse came scurrying out from under the curtains and back out of Marcus' room past Elena who shrieked and then it went into the living room.
I went to Craig and James' house to tell them what happened and Craig was just about dying with laughter at this whole event, along with Kelly and Chantal.
Meanwhile back at Unit 4, the mouse had scurried under one of the couches. Johann had perched himself atop of one of the couches and was totally freaking out. Poor Marcus didn't know what to do and Elena was perched on one of the stools.
By the time I came back the mouse was gone, we think it went out the back door which they had opened for it. Elena and I decided to close the door after that to make sure that more critters didn't come in.
And that... is how you make chocolate chip cookies in Australia
6 Comments:
Here's what I found on the spider.
http://www.amonline.net.au/factsheets/huntsman_spiders.htm
I hate spiders.
From the sounds of Craig's website, you'd better get used to them. I love the part about them hiding in the car visors - YIKES!
What you guys need is a CAT to keep the critters away.
That is so gross. I hate spiders so much but to have them that huge I would be doing a lot more than just jumping on to a chair. It would take a very long time to get me bak down.
How did the cookies turn out?
That spider is DISGUSTING. I searched for an image of it...HUGE. That would be scary.
Glad to hear you've made some cool friends!
Craig: Thanks Craig for looking up a link for everyone.
Sue: Actually we were told that having that spider around the house would be good because spiders are very territorial and thus since the spider isn't poisonous it would eat any poisonous ones that came around or simply keep them away.
Denise: The cookies turned out pretty good, we didn't entirely use the usual ingredients since they weren't around at the time, so instead of brown sugar we just used white sugar instead, and instead of baking soda we used twice as much baking powder.
Kerri #1: Thanks Kerri! It's fun having friends from other countries.
Hey Val!
Sounds like you're having a great time in Australia. I can't wait to go there someday and see all the cool stuff, minus the spiders!
Adam
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