Kashering the kitchen

Thank G-d our apartment has an awesome kitchen and came with quite a few pots and pans. Unfortunately, the previous tenant was not Jewish and the kashrus status of everything was suspect. We spent this week running around town getting things we need for the apartment and looking for the most important pan of all, which was not included with the apartment...the cookie sheet pan. 

For some reason, none of the department stores had anything that could work as a cookie sheet. Finally we found one at the grocery store...makes sense. Once we had that, I decided that the priority was to kasher the kitchen so I could make chocolate chip cookies. Fortunately, my father in-law is a rav and knows all the relevant halachos (even for ashkenazim) and he was able to help us (read: "do everything") make everything kosher. 

The one thing that was left for me to do was leave the oven on the highest temperature for 45 minutes. I got the first part (turning on the oven) done, but as they say "the first thing to go when you turn 30 is your memory" and I forgot to turn it off.  Several hours later, during dinner at the in-laws, while my wife was telling a fascinating story, all the sudden I woke up and said "holy tomatoes, I left the oven on!" (or something extremely appropriate like that). My FIL drove me back to our building and I ran all the way up to our apartment. Here's where I need to rewind to the night before when I attempted to kasher the oven, but turned it off after 10 minutes because it was smoking and I was afraid of setting off the fire alarm and evacuating hundreds of people. As I was running up the steps (I think I took the elevator, but that's not so dramatic) I had visions of our apartment looking something like our restaurant. BH everything was fine and there was no smoke at all. 

As we drove back to dinner, we passed a lady standing on the street. Turns out it was Nehama (my lovely wife. I think maybe I forgot to introduce her?) who was panicking and saying tehillim on the street, holy lady. Then we all laughed at her and finished dinner. Most importantly, today I made cookies and they taste almost as good here as they did in 'Merica!