We finished the soup on Sunday night and had a slice each of the last small loaf of pumpkin bread that I thawed from the freezer for dessert.

Rotisserie chicken, pasta and green beans.

I had BBQ pulled pork sandwich with coleslaw and chips.

Its been too hot to cook for nearly a month, and I have been living on sandwiches. I have found a neat bun/bread called "Sandwich Starters" at Trader Joe which is like small rectangular foccacio which makes a great sandwich that can be heated up in a frying pan. I've found some sandwich buns are too soft and crumble in your hands, and others have big holes that lets the mustard dripped out. Has anyone tried to make sandwich size focaccia? I've mainly made this bigger and sliced them up later.
I tried cooking black bean soup in a slow cooker which doesn't heat the kitchen as much. And even if it did I can safely hide in the basement from the slow cooker. I'm going to have to start doing bread again in a slow cooker and look at other recipes.

Storms rolled through here late morning/early afternoon and the electric power rolled out. I was without power until about 4:30. You never know how long it's going to be out so it's hard to plan. I didn't want to open the fridge so I ordered out a late lunch from McD's. I haven't had them in about 25 years. I enjoyed it. I wanted to order from Wendy's but they were offline: I suspect they were also without power. Since lunch was not exactly a well balanced meal, I wanted a veggie laden dinner, so I made a simple chicken veggie soup with sugar snap peas, carrot and a little cauliflower.

On Wednesday, I made a sliced tomato, cucumber, and onion salad like my grandmother and mother used to make. I made it several years ago, with Sara Wirth's help, but I had not written down the recipe. I used the search function at Nebraska Kitchen and found where she told me that she used equal parts vinegar and sugar. I then watched some YouTube recipes of different versions but decided to use her ingredients and proportions, with ½ tsp. salt. However, I did learn not to slice the vegetables too thin but about 1/4 inch each. The two tomatoes came from the farmers market, as ours are not yet ready. The cucumber was in a bucket marked "free" when I walked last week, so I took one. The onion is a regular yellow one from the store. I used a large, deep ceramic quiche dish for the salad (my mother and grandmother probably use a Tupperware Pie holder) and stirred it around a couple of times during the day.

I had some of the salad with dinner on Wednesday. I used cider vinegar, but next time, I may do half cider and half white. Scott, who is not a fan of cucumber (unless I make refrigerator dills) or onion, had microwaved broccoli for his vegetable. I also made pecan-coated boneless pork chops and roasted potato chunks tossed in olive oil. The potatoes are also from the farmers market.

We had more rain and thunderstorms in the late morning and early afternoon. Annie is hanging in there, with the help of her fan set to medium or high to make the thunder's noise bearable.

Light supper lime tortilla chips and guacamole.