[Mike Nolan]

Diane had a filet, I had a T-bone, we did 8 crab-stuffed mushrooms and then we topped it off using the grill to heat marshmallows for smores. (Both steaks came in packages of two, so we'll have steaks again in another 2-3 days.)

This reminds me of the summer we bought 100 pounds of NY Strip steaks at the public TV auction, when we picked it up at one of the packing plants near Omaha we found it was 10 full uncut strips. So I spent the better part of an afternoon cutting steaks, wrapping them in freezer paper and putting them in the freezer.

For the rest of the summer, every few days we'd get out a NY Strip steak or two for supper. It got to the point where we'd all say, "What, NY Strip--again??"

The container says the crab has to be eaten within 2 days of when the package is opened, so we're thinking of something like crab alfredo for tomorrow. (This was the crab at Costco, which is quite good.)

The grill is well and truly christened.

I ordered some Prague #1 pink salt, I plan to try making Montreal Smoked Meat, I found a recipe that starts by having you cure the brisket for 4 days using a rub that includes Prague #1, then rinse it, put a different rub on, smoke it for 6-8 hours, then steam it to give it that fall-apart tenderness that you get with good pastrami.

[Mike Nolan]

The new grill is hooked up and ready to go, so we're having steaks and crab-stuffed mushrooms for supper.

During the burn-in the temperature dial was over 800, so this one gets really hot, I'm looking forward to trying some pizzas in it.

[Mike Nolan]

I thought it was going to be similar to the stuff I make with left over scraps of laminated dough, and it has some similarities, but also some differences.

[Mike Nolan]

I wound up having a salad with tuna on it. Diane is having some lavash with melted cheese on it.

[Mike Nolan]

The new gas grill is here, but it uses a different sized quick-connect valve, so we need to get a plumber out to work on the gas pipe.

[Mike Nolan]

This is more of a 'family' dessert than something I'd make for dinner with guests, I may try it again adding a little cinnamon to the butter block. The instructions have you take the butter block out of the fridge about 15 minutes before you start the lamination process, I think I'd cut that to 10 minutes in summertime, it was getting pretty soft as I made the folds. By the time you get it in the cake pan, its too late for refrigerating it to have much value.

The instructions say not to worry if it looks like a mess going into the oven, it will come out great. It looked pretty good going in, though it was a bit messy getting it onto the parchment.

We ate about half of it today, I'll be interested to see how it is tomorrow.

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[Mike Nolan]

Here's what the kouign amman looked like when it came out of the oven:

Here's what a slice of it looks like:

We think it's better with a little cinnamon and/or chocolate.

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[Mike Nolan]

It'll be burgers on the (old) grill, salad and some of the kouign amann for supper tonight.

Happy Father's Day to all the dads out there.

[Mike Nolan]

We are planning BLT's for supper.

[Mike Nolan]

I don't think this is the article I was thinking of (I think perhaps the link I gave before and upthread was revised to a text format from a tabular one), but this looks like a pretty good table on substitutes for egg washes from a source that I use frequently:

https://bakerpedia.com/ingredients/egg-wash-substitute/

And here's a link (to an archive site, as the original site may no longer be around) that looks useful:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100913084511/http://www.piemaven.com/egg_wash.htm

[Mike Nolan]

We had sandwiches on some of the semolina bread.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm not fond of chamomile and in general I think tea makes for bland baked goods. The subtleties of tea tend to get buried by flour. (I have well over a dozen types of tea in the cupboard.)

Cinnamon might be an improvement over tea. As to the internal texture, lowering the temperature and increasing the bake time might help.

[Mike Nolan]

I'm thinking there was another link to washes that included things other than egg washes, but I haven't spent a lot of time looking for it. As I recall, this one was more tabular in form.

[Mike Nolan]

Here's the link on egg washes:

https://www.cooksinfo.com/egg-wash

[Mike Nolan]

I'm a bit worried that my tomato plants got stunted a few days after I planted them, when it hit 38 degrees one night. Some of them haven't grown much in the nearly 4 weeks since then, and none of them have really taken off like I would have expected.

Hopefully I'll still get an OK crop, but maybe it'll be a few weeks later than I was hoping. Last year we had our first tomatoes by about July 6th. (They were '4th of July' plants, of course.)

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