Mike Nolan
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Did you try sandwiching the tortillas between two damp paper towels?
NY strip steak, mushrooms, baked potato and sweet corn here. The vendor I got the corn from this afternoon says she expect to have it until first frost. I also bought a cantaloupe, might be the last one I have to buy for a while, I've got several that are getting close to ripe, including one Crenshaw. (Oddly enough, that appears to be the only Crenshaw that set.)
If the weather cooperates, and the current forecast says it should, tomorrow I'm trying a pizza on the grill.
King Arthur has been sending out emails on their new 'pizza school' lately. I don't have their pizza flour, but I'm going to try making pizza on the grill Saturday, using a blend of AP and pastry flour.
Our Whole Foods is on the other side of town, we don't get that way very often and I probably haven't been inside the Whole Foods yet this year. We've got an Aldi's and a Trader Joe's nearby, as well as two big grocery stores. Of the two, I actually prefer the Aldi's.
We've also got a Natural Grocers across town, that's where I get my BRM pastry flour, under $6 for 5 pounds, so a lot cheaper than King Arthur. KA has raised their 'free shipping' point to $99. I've still got some of their baker's special powdered milk, that's the only thing I haven't found a different source for yet.
I've been to that end of town a few times lately, once just to check out the Chicago hot dog place. Been back there twice, for mall food the dogs are reasonable versions of a Chicago dog, but they were out of Italian Beef on my two return trips. That place needs to get its stuff together, they're losing business big time. They're the 2nd store in a new mini-chain, the concept is OK if they get their supplier issues fixed.
The guy who founded Portillo's sold the company to a Boston-based private equity group a couple of years ago, for about $900 million. He retained ownership of a number of the buildings, though. A typical Portillo's has a yearly turn of over $7 million, or about twice the typical McDonalds. Chick-Fil-A also has a high average store volume, which I can believe given the lines I see in their drive-thru nearly every day. (Unfortunately, all their chicken is marinated in a garlic marinade, so my wife can't eat there.)
The Tribune had an article a while back ranking 30 non-chain Italian Beef shops. Now that's research that you can sink your teeth into!
In Chicago Al's Beef is generally considered the best of the chains, Mr. Beef is pretty good, too. (I've only been to an Al's once, I thought the beef was too greasy, maybe that wasn't representative, though.) I've seen frozen Italian Beef in stores, including Sams Club, the brand is Charlie's. It's OK, but I need to find a sturdier bun recipe, or just stick with Rotella, made in Omaha, they're not quite as good as the buns in Chicago but hold up better when dipped than my home-made ones do.
BA, your chocolate cinnamon rolls would probably freeze well, if you have freezer space for them. When I make a batch of cinnamon rolls I freeze most of them in bags of 2, I do the same for burger buns and banana nut mini-muffins. (We reuse the bags.) Most of the time I cut the rolls into 1" segments for baking, we like them small. The batch I made for my neighbor I cut into 2" segments, though. I think I'll need to make another batch of them next week, that's when I'll test the cheese slicer method.
Our latest house problem is that my garage door opener has a bracket above the door that pulled loose. It still works but I'm trying to avoid opening it, as I don't know how much stress that is putting on the door or the other brackets.
I stick with red tomatoes, so that I know when they're ripe, with the others I'm never sure.
Mostly just getting 4th of July tomatoes here a dozen or more every day or two, so far we've had just one or two First Lady. There are others that are getting pretty good sized but not ripening yet, but they're later varieties like Italian heirloom, Amish paste, Rutgers and Celebrity. It was really cool yesterday, with a half inch of rain, so maybe more fruit will have set.
There are a few melons getting close to the picking point, including a really nice big Crenshaw that hasn't started turning yellow yet. Crenshaw can get up to 10 pounds, this one is gonna be in that range, I suspect.
A friend of ours who likes eggplant picked a big sack of them last night, mostly the white ones but one or two purple ones, but there are lots of them left and I think they're still setting new fruit. I'm going to plan on making an eggplant lasagna-style dish soon, possibly this weekend.
I need to thin out the lettuce in the Aerogarden again. It produces more lettuce than we normally eat, I should try to come up with something else I can grow in it, for variety. My son did bok choi and poblano peppers, but neither of those are high on our list of veggies.
I don't have Hulu, so I'm not sure there's anywhere I can watch it.
Barley has historically been the peasant's grain, that was true in biblical times and in medieval times. They ate it as a cooked grain gruel, used it to thicken soups and made bread with it. It was also used for brewing beer, of course.
It isn't clear when bakers started using the yeast byproducts of beer making in their bread, many historians think that practice dates back to the Egyptians but it may be much older than that. Barley doesn't have enough gluten to support a high rising bread, so it would have been more of a flatbread or quick bread.
I've seen barley flour in 'flourless' cakes, it doesn't have much gluten so it doesn't add a lot of structure. Every time I look at the 'Katharine Hepburn Brownie' recipe, which uses maybe a 1/4 cup of flour, I wonder if you could make it with a non-wheat flour like barley flour. (It wouldn't be gluten-free, though.)
Barley syrup is sometimes used with chocolate candies, it adds a sweetness that complements chocolate well. It has a nuttiness to it, too.
We had takeout again.
I definitely recommend toasting nuts before using them in a bread.
We had sweet corn and some leftover take-out.
Well, they have to pay for all those electric mail trucks that they didn't want to order (but did to appease Congress) somehow.
UPS and FEDEX have had holiday surcharges for a few years, at least for retail customers and small-volume shippers.
Two years ago I made my own chocolate Advent calendar and it cost us something like $35 to ship it to our granddaughter. For that price I could have ordered her a Godiva chocolate calendar or two.
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