The Land of Pilsner

I'm using the oven in my new apartment for the first time. I'm attempting to do a version of cowboy cookies. I say trying because I've run into a few challenges. First of all, the oven doesn't have temperature marked in degrees. Instead it has the numbers one through 10 on a knob. Or is it 1 through 8? Not that it matters, because it doesn't correspond to any degree system I'm familiar with. My roommate says "between 2 and 3 is pretty standard"... The rest of my challenges have been in the realm of ingredients. There are no chocolate chips here as far as I can tell. No big deal, I bought some tasty chocolate and chunked it with a knife. I do, however, take this to be a disappointing indication of the diminished role of chocolate in baked goods here. Also, there is no brown sugar. I improvised with some "beet sugar" or molasses and the regular stuff. The best I could do for vanilla is this packet I found claiming to be "natural." When I opened it, the substance claiming to be vanilla ooooozed out. Vanilla does not ooze. So, I'm going to have to find some sort of proper vanilla stat, but for now, my expectations for the cookies are not that high. I have to say though, the smell of them baking makes me feel right at home.

The one thing I never expected to be missing here, is beer. I thought I was coming to the land of beer. Oooohh, they do have large quantities of it to be sure. The bottles are all .5 L, about one and a half of our beers. In the back of the stores you see what seems to be a very impressive selection of beer. I was excited the first time I saw those rows of crates filled with big bottles for 60 cents a piece. Then I started searching to my favorite varieties, lager, ale, reds, blonds, porters, stouts... I saw Pils, pilsner, pils, pils, pils, pilsner.... on and on, with a few dark beers crowded into small corners. So many rows of beer, such an apparent abundance of variety! Oh the disappointment. Germany is not the land of beer as I was lead to believe, it is the land of Pilsners! Not that I don't enjoy a good Pilsner from time to time, but sometimes I just want more.

I've asked around a bit, and have searched on the internet to try to find a store with a better beer selection. I have always been met with stony replies of "what, you don't like our beer? Our beer is the best. This is Germany! World famous for beer and wurst!" The variety of wurst here is much more impressive than that of beer. I even found on the internet a gentleman in Bavaria looking for a beer store which sells Belgian ales, and one of the responses was "German brewers would never allow for such a thing to enter our land. And I agree with them!" Wow. The poor guy was just looking for a little variety, you know, the spice of life? Oh well, at least they've got lots of wine from other countries. This may not be my year for beer, I'm afraid.

Well, my cookies seem to have come out alright against all odds. The roommates are raving.