The land of milk and honey

So this is the land of plenty, if you are looking for certain things.  Honey is one of those things.  The local grocery store and a large selection of honey.  And I do mean large.  The shelf area is probably 4 feet wide and runs from top to bottom, with the top being standard grocery aisle height.  Many different flavors of honey are available, mostly from different types of gum trees.  If quanity is more important than the quality of the honey, you can purchase a 3 liter jug of honey.  3 liters! That's about the same as 3/4 of a gallon.  That's a lot of honey.  Milk is very similar.  It's not like in the States with Whole, 2%, 1% and Skim.  Here milk is full cream, lite, or fat free.  But, there are so many different types of milk.  There's some standards like grass-feed milk cows and organic, but there are some different things too.  Lots of different types of soy milk.  I can't even remember all the different types of soy milk.  There are just too many to count.  There's also plenty of rice milk.  And oat milk (never heard of it) and goat milk.  Interesting.  I would say that this is the first time that I've ever seen goat milk in a standard chain-type grocery store.  (I tend to shop at Woolworths, by the way.)

Learning to cook, all over again

So, two of our kids have been begging for mac n cheese.  My hubby and those two kids are big fans of Kraft Mac N Cheese, but that is not sold here.  So, I thought I'd make some mac n cheese from scratch.  It wouldn't be like Kraft, but maybe they'd be happy with it.  I haven't made it for years and my recipes and cookbooks are still waiting to be delivered here.  I searched online for a recipe, but what came up first were all metric recipes (I searched on Google Australia).  Metric would be fine but I have no idea how much 50g of butter is and have no scale for measuring it.  So I searched again and found some more recipes, this time in standard measurements.  No problem I thought.  I started boiling water and preheating the oven, which for some reason only went to 250 degrees.  How was I going to cook something at 350?  I just set the oven to high and went about my way.  I finished the mac n cheese and put into the oven to bake.  After a very short time in the oven, a light went off in my head and I realized that the temps on the oven were Celsius!  Oh crap, I yanked my mac n cheese out, but it was already very crisp on top.  I cooled the oven down to the proper temp of about 175 and continued baking.  Of course, I was trying to be on the ball with dinner for once.  While it was baking, Jay emailed to let me know that we were eating out with a couple people from work.  Oh.  So I then had to cool down the mac n cheese all the way and put in the fridge for the next day. 
We ate it yesterday with pork cutlets, veggies, and pineapple.  It wasn't very good.  I will need to find a different recipe and next time make sure that we are eating at home. 
On a related note, the pork cutlets were great.  Meat selection in grocery stores is very different from the US.  There is only a small amount of pork available.  Beef is about the same but not labeled at 93% lean or anything.  Chicken is much smaller than in the US.  There is also a huge selection of lamb (Jay loves, but I do not), mutton (never tried it), veal (no thanks), and kangaroo.  Yes, I said kangaroo.  There is also a little ground turkey for $10 a kilogram.  All the meat here is healthier than in the US.  No hormones and most things are free range. 
I'm sure that I get the hang of it.  I will just need to make a cheat sheet for the temps. 
On a different topic, the kids' beds here are not twin beds.  They are single beds.  Single beds are a fair bit smaller than twins.  What this means is that all the twin bed sheets and bed pads won't fit.  Boy, am I glad that I used some of our weight allowance to ship them.  Geez. 

Doubt

In the days leading up to the flight out here, I had a few moments of panic, but never any doubt that this is an adventure we wanted to have.  Yesterday, I had my first "doubt attack."
We drove from Sydney to Nelson Bay yesterday morning.  Nelson Bay is a little northeast of Newcastle and is where we will be staying for the next few weeks while we set up shop.  We have a nice 3 bedroom apartment that is fully furnished and has a bed for every head.  Our apartment also has two balconies.  We had two lorikeets on our railing yesterday morning and I can hear a lot of them outside this morning.  We spent the afternoon sorta just driving around having a look.  It rained almost all day yesterday and so there wasn't much time out of the car. 
We turned onto a small dirt road in order to drive back to a beach and see the ocean views.  I managed to spot this fellow sitting on a branch next to the road. 

Of course, once we saw this kookaburra, we saw lots of them.  We also had two kangaroos bound out in the road in front of us.  There were two kangaroos bound across the road in front of our car yesterday as well.  Really fast, but completely awesome to see. 

We ate out for lunch, but decided to cook dinner in our room.  This required a trip to the grocery store.  The store we chose was very close to our apartment, but also sorta small.  This is the first time I've ever bought anything in Australia and there was a lot of sticker shock.  Milk costs about $5 a gallon.  This is not organic or anything special.  Just regular 2% milk.  This store did not have any skim milk either.  Most everything else is just a little more expensive than the US, though the price looks steep.  For instance, apples at $3.89 look expensive, until you realize that it is for a kilogram not a pound.  There are 2.2 pound for every kilogram.  So the apples are more like $1.77 per pound.  Apples and melons are about the only fruit available now since it is winter.  The lettuce selection is lacking as well.  Packaged foods are much higher than US though.  I really dislike paying over $9 for a box of cereal.  This shopping trip really brought on some doubt.  As I am standing in the store, tired and jet lagged, with a tired, jet-lagged husband and three tired, jet-lagged kids, and I just need to pick out laundry detergent.  I have never heard of any of these brands.  They are all powders which don't rinse as cleanly out of clothes.  There were no fragnace free brands and I have no clue how my uber sensative skin is going to react to any of these detergents.  I started to doubt.  I started to doubt that up-rooting my kids and stressing out my extended family was going to be worth anything.  I froze and stood there doing nothing for several minutes, completely in panic mode.  At least, I was able to snap out of it and grab a random, small $12 box of detergent.  I am hoping that some of the prices are due to the fact that Nelson Bay is a resort town.  Hopefully, once we settle out of here, it will be a little more reasonable.
We had had such a good night of sleep the first night in Australia that I was hoping for another decent night last night.  Not so much.  Joe woke up around 2 in the morning and went to the bathroom.  Very thin walls caused Jay and I to awake as well.  Around 3, Joe decided to wake up Tom as well.  Once both of them were awake it was hard to keep them from waking up Sam, simply because they kept taking trips to the bathroom, which shares a wall with Sam's room.  Tom managed to fall back to sleep around 4ish.  Jay back to sleep around 5.  Joe may be asleep now at 7, but Sam and I are awake. 
Thankfully, the sky looks clear right now so we will be able to at least get out of the car and wander around. Now, to go eat some $9 cereal.