Nachos and Cheese and House Hunting

I grew up in the Netherlands, where there is not much variety in cuisines beyond Chinese food, which usually is actually Indonesian over there. My mom was a typical Dutch person with a healthy suspicion for any food which wasn't Dutch or Indonesian, so we ate boiled potatoes and boiled veggies and meat. We definitely never ate nachos and cheese. Heck, I am not sure whether I even knew about the existence of nachos and cheese.

When I moved to the States, I heard about them, but it took awhile before I actually got to eat them. Once I did... I was addicted! Somehow I never learned how to make them though. So much life, so little time. A a few days ago, I decided to start to learn. I was home by myself and put some nachos with grated cheese topping in the oven. Not bad, but not really what I wanted. I was envisioning the gooey yummy cheese sauce I am used to see on nachos.

Fast forward to tonight when I tried this recipe from the Big Red Kitchen. I was attracted to the simplicity of the recipe. I mean, I wanted to make nachos and cheese, but I didn't want to spend tons of time to prepare before I could eat them. They turned out very well with sharp cheddar and mozarella (the cheeses we had available) and everyone enjoyed them. Well, the ones that like nachos and cheese that is.

 

On Friday we spent our first day house hunting. We looked at four houses. First one was old town offices, a lovely house, school with big playground and ball field in the back yard, and interesting attics. The drawback was a very old, very small kitchen and the biggest drawback was the very busy road in the front yard. Both the house and the front yard location didn't feel like our best choice.

Second house was boring looking on the outside, but excellent on the inside. It was a newer house, built in 2003. Four bedrooms, everything in such good shape. Walk out basement, nice big backyard, and to make it really Vermonty, it was at the end of a dead end dirt road. This house gets the top place for now.

 

Third house had The Best Kitchen Ever, and was in good shape. It had a cemetery behind the backyard, which the realtor was apologetic about, but we reassured her that we would be fine with that. What I wasn't fine with was yet again a very busy road in the front. Not to mention that the 'river frontage' which had been advertised as something wonderful and perfect, was on the other side of the road. Let's just say that kids and busy roads do not go together well. It would be a great house for a family with older, or no kids. But not for us.

Fourth house looked great in the pictures, but was in bad shape and built by a do-it-yourselver who wasn't a very good do-it-yourselver. It had many weird issues, and it again wasn't our best choice for a house.

 

One out of four isn't bad though, is it?

Tonight, we spent some time driving past more houses. Some got rejected when we couldn't find it after driving for three hours on a smaller and smaller dirt road and STILL not being there. Others got rejected for other visible reasons when we drove by. It was interesting to drive around on unknown dirt roads and NOT knowing whether this was either a dirt road which went somewhere, or a dirt road which would disappear into mud and nothingness. With big drop offs next to the road for good measure. Making me wonder how I would EVER be able to turn around the van here if needed.

Did I mention how it was raining? And we drove through a Very Impressive Thunder Storm and I did not like half of the dirt roads, and life was wet and that is why we needed nachos and cheese when we came home.