[Mike Nolan]

For our first night back after 10 nights on the road, we went with a rotisserie chicken from Sams.

Tomorrow we will be having Chicago hot dogs (with Vienna hot dogs and buns bought in Illinois) for lunch and Italian Beef Sandwiches (for me) for supper, with a kit we bought at a Portillo's location on the way home. Also bought some Rocky Mountain chocolates and some chocolates from a local store in Galena Il. (Rocky Mountain chocolates are always good, the ones from the local store ranged from OK to pretty good.)

Came back with 4 full coolers: One with 16.5 pounds of Callebaut semi-sweet chocolate callets and other chocolates, another with the meat, one with about 25 bottles of wine from various wineries in Illinois and Pennsylvania and the 4th one was beverages and snack foods for the road.

Last Sunday we had a graduation celebration brunch with a number of Kelita's classmates and friends and their parents. The restaurant (Casbah) served some breakfast pastries that included a sumac mini-muffin, sweet but not overpoweringly so. I bought some ground sumac berries at Penzey's in Pittsburgh and am going to see if I can come up with a recipe for them. I'm guessing there was some buttermilk in them, and there are recipes for buttermilk sumac muffins online.

[Mike Nolan]

Dinner tonight was a salad plus cookies eaten for quality control purposes.

[Mike Nolan]

I made 2 batches of oatmeal crisp cookies with chocolate chips and one batch with M&M's, a total of about 200 cookies.

Divided then up into 5 containers, one for each of my brothers, one for my son & family, one for us as road food and one for the guys who will be house-sitting for us while we're out of town.

[Mike Nolan]

We had salads and I had a salami sandwich.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm putting in two more hybridized American chestnut trees in the front yard, one of the two I put in several years ago is doing poorly and may not survive. The main leader looks dead and the side leader might not be in great shape.

The new ones are pretty small, less than a foot tall. So they've got a lot of growing to do.

[Mike Nolan]

We had more NY Strip steak for supper, with a baked potato and some strawberry ice cream with hot fudge sauce.

[Mike Nolan]

We had a horde of earwigs in our mailbox, some diatomaceous earth got them scrambling to leave in a hurry. But be careful not to inhale it.

[Mike Nolan]

I will be making several batches of oatmeal crisp chocolate chip cookies, probably over the weekend, in anticipation of our trip to visit my brothers and attend our granddaughter's HS graduation. Some will be traveling food, most will be to give to my brothers, son and granddaughter.

[Mike Nolan]

I did bake more honey wheat bread today.

[Mike Nolan]

We had tacos/taco salad tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

Our cat is an indoors-only cat since losing his left eye (someone shot him with a bb gun), but when he was allowed outdoors the foxes would bark at him until we let him back in.

[Mike Nolan]

We definitely have a full family of foxes this summer, here are what appears to be one adult and 3 kits.

Also got to watch some interesting nature footage the other day, we had one of the younger foxes and a racoon on the balcony, and they were having a bit of a standoff. Then one of the adult foxes came along and the racoon backed off to below where the camera is, pulling one of the trays of peanuts with him.

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[Mike Nolan]

Amazon has 20 pounds of Unpretentious pastry flour for around $3 a pound, free shipping on Prime. Still several times what I'd use in a year.

[Mike Nolan]

Some KABC products are available on Amazon, which, if you have Prime, usually means free shipping, but their pastry flour isn't one of them. There is a 5 pound bag of‎ Despensa Colombiana (sounds Italian but it says made in USA) pastry flour on Amazon for $15, but that's still quite a bit more than the BRM pastry flour was. I may have to try the Azure Standard one. (Getting to the $50 minimum order on things I want might take me a while.)

[Mike Nolan]

Webstaurant has 50 pounds of patent pastry flour, made from soft red wheat, for about $20, but I've ordered other flours from them before and shipping was more like $50 for a 50 pound bag. Not to mention that's more pastry flour than I'd use in 5 or more years.

Stovers in Cheswick Pennsylvania also has 50 pounds of pastry flour for about $25, but shipping might be an issue with them as well, and I don't know the flour brand's reputation.

I'll be going through Indiana next month when we go to our granddaughter's HS graduation in Pittsburgh, and am hoping to stop at Stover's at some point, but I'm not sure what route we're taking on the way back. If we use I-80 I think we're north of you, if we use I-70 (so we can stop in Columbus OH at the North Market), we'd probably be fairly south of you.

Update: I was just looking over the list of vendors at the North Market and there's been a lot of turnover there, several of the vendors I was hoping to visit are no longer there, so that probably means we'll be using I-80 on the way home, which is about an hour faster anyway.

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