[Mike Nolan]

I'm planning to make a Texas Chocolate Sheet Cake later tonight, an 8x8 for tomorrow (my birthday) and a 10x10 for the 17th (our 50th wedding
anniversary.

[Mike Nolan]

When I ordered 50 pounds of semolina from webstaurant a couple of years ago, the flour was about $26 and the shipping was about $29. It took me about 18 months to go through that much semolina, but the per-pound price delivered was nearly $2 less than what I could buy semolina for locally, when it was in stock.

I suspect both prices and shipping costs have gone up since then. Last time I ordered semolina I bought a 25 pound sack of BRM semolina. I think it was around $30 plus shipping at the time, webstaurant currently has the 25 pound sack of it at about $41 plus shipping.

[Mike Nolan]

Dinner tonight was tuna salad in an Amish Paste tomato. I think they may be the most flavorful tomatoes we grow.

[Mike Nolan]

The bigger tomatoes are finally starting to ripen, I picked one yesterday that was 13.5 ounces, I think it is an Amish Paste variety. I'll probably do another batch of tomato juice in the next few days, maybe Monday.

[Mike Nolan]

We've had some unexpected expenses lately, too, so this is kind of a back burner wish list item.

[Mike Nolan]

I have similar thoughts, sounds like something I'd use but it is a tad pricey.

I'd say hope that the price comes down, but I think the Brod & Taylor proofer has already gone up in price since it first was introduced.

[Mike Nolan]

Well, the like button kept crashing the site, so it probably isn't coming back.

[Mike Nolan]

We had tomato and salami sandwiches.

[Mike Nolan]

We had tacos tonight.

[Mike Nolan]

I think the folks at Brod and Taylor must have noticed the posts on various sites a few years ago about using a clay slab roller to roll out laminated dough.

See https://brodandtaylor.com/products/dough-sheeter

The specs say the sheeter board is 23.5 x 12 inches and will handle 200-300 grams of dough. I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to make a longer sheeter board if that's too short.

It gets down to 1mm thickness, it'd probably be good for things like crackers and pasta dough, too. My KA pasta roller attachments are only 5 1/2 inches wide.

[Mike Nolan]

There was a story a few weeks back about foreign sellers on Amazon, one garlic peeler had something like 24 PAGES of listings, most with the same picture but 'different' sellers, most of them at similar prices.

I've pretty much given up on both Amazon and walmart.com for things like flour. I can get 12 pound bags of KAF AP flour at Costco and 25 pound bags of semolina from places like webstauarant.com

Google searches are getting near useless, too, the first page is full of advertised things that may not even be what you were searching for. I haven't used duck duck go enough to know if they've got the same problem.

But buying local is fraught with problems as well, so many things are out of stock and really expensive if they have them (and you can't trust website 'inventories') and what's 'local' anyway? Is WalMart local?

[Mike Nolan]

I find myself less and less interested in even looking at walmart.com lately, the selection seems meager, the prices aren't great and the last time I ordered from them it never arrived and took several weeks for a refund.

You also cannot depend on walmart.com to know what's in stock at your local walmart, or where to find it in the store. It doesn't help that there's no apparent logical order to how they number their aisles.

And then there's this story about a scam 30TB solid state drive that was available on walmart.com:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/akek8e/walmart-30tb-ssd-hard-drive-scam-sd-cards

[Mike Nolan]

I worry that there will be another short-term shortage of natural gas, we're still paying for the shortage two years ago, when the gas company had to buy on the spot market at a much higher price.

[Mike Nolan]

We went laptop shopping, both of ours are wearing out. Then we picked up some takeout on the way home.

[Mike Nolan]

Canned 5 quarts of tomato juice today, that gives me 10 for the season. Last year I did 28.

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