kayb

I add my thanks. The region fascinates me. Thanks for bringing it to my living room.

No photos, but... Used some of @ElainaA's roasted cherry tomato sauce I had in the fridge as the basis for what wound up an excellent meat sauce for dinner yesterday. Sauteed a diced onion, browned a pound of ground beef. Added a couple ounces of tomato paste. Pureed the roasted cherry tomato sauce with a stick blender. Added it, as well as a cup of homemade tomato sauce from last year's batch, and simmered for 30 minutes or so. Added fresh, minced basil and oregano from the herb garden, and a couple of pinches of red pepper flakes. Pretty marvelous. Served it over a combo of tortellini and small ravioli I'd picked up at Aldi; had one two-portion package of each, and three adults, so thought we'd need more. Tortellini was excellent; ravioli, not so much. Cheese-filled, and the cheese seemed chalky, for want of a better descriptor. I picked out and chunked the remaining ravs, and dished up some leftover tortellini with some leftover sauce, as well as a dish of just sauce that will serve nicely on English muffin halves or flatbreads as "mini pizza" with some cheese.

Fascinating. In Hot Springs, AR, they brew beer with thermal water from the springs. Still have to heat it hotter, but it's already at 145F. Considerable savings on electricity to heat, plus it's damn good water and damn good beer.

Those onion rings! I LOVE a good onion ring, and those look like prime quality.

I echo @blue_dolphin's sentiments -- very much enjoying the your travels! Damned if I'd do that trip in the summer, though.

They have obviously never been to Payne's Barbecue in Memphis, nor Jones' BBQ Cafe in Marianna, AR (winner of a James Beard American Classic award).

The remains of a breakfast pizza the kids, grandkids and I decimated this morning. Going to see how the leftovers heat up in the CSO tomorrow.

I'd love to have it as well, @Kerry Beal. Never made a yorkie. Should try it.

Sweet pickle relish. Brine of 4 cups vinegar, 2 cups sugar, 4 tbsp. pickling spice. In addition to cucumbers, a couple of big onions and a healthy double handful of Cubanelle sweet peppers shredded up in there. An experiment, as I attempt to deal with the continuing onslaught of the cucumbers. Of course, I still have about half the last harvest, which I tried my best to give away. And I picked about twice that many today. I can't win. Tuesday I am going to a friend's house to pick figs. There is fig jam in my future.

What was going to be a pastrami and cheese sandwich, but I decided to forego the bread, sandwich the pastrami with cheese, and use the mustard as a dip. With tomatoes, cottage cheese, some of this year's bread and butter pickles, and a bowl of watermelon chunks.

My everyday dinnerware is Pfaltzgraff, a white on white pattern I picked up at a Big Lots outlet store...two four-place sets, $50 each. Dinner plates, salad/dessert plates, soup/salad/pasta bowls, mugs. No serving pieces, no cereal bowls. You can order the matching or complementary serving pieces. Highly recommend outlet shopping if they're accessible to you.

Y'all excuse me. I think I'll betake myself to the ER, so I'll already be there for the onset of the diabetic coma. Lord, this looks astounding.

How are you baking with it this damn hot? I can't do it. Unless it goes in the CSO.

Cell phone app, "Out of Milk." Free. You can sign in, create an account, and then anyone in the household (or that you want to have the login info) can add to it from any device. It separates into produce, dairy, pantry, etc., but sometimes it doesn't recognize my names for stuff. You can also organize different lists for different stores; I typically shop at four different ones, occasionally a fifth, though not all at a regular interval. And even though I work at home and mostly set my own schedule, I still find myself doing my grocery shopping on Saturday morning, for some reason.

Two slices of Muenster cheese. No crackers, no bread, just cheese. Because I had an English muffin with blackberry jam for breakfast, and needed something salty.

There is nothing worse than bad sushi.

This one is what I have. It's showing on Amazon Prime right now for $15.56. I'm happy with it; I like the ease of being able to dump the yogurt in, snap the top on, and stash it in the fridge. I never have room for my big colander in the fridge. It holds a half-gallon, but it fills it completely.

Thanks for taking us along. A completely new set of sights for me.

Have placed my Prime order; nothing significant in the Prime category for the kitchen, though I did buy a set of stainless steel mixing bowls, being that one of my plastic ones sprang a leak when it was on the counter with new potatoes soaking in water. Figured I'd just retire all of them. Best deal of the night for me was 30 percent off a pair of Merrell hiking boots I've been lusting after.

No. We're getting into the low, mid-90s daily, but haven't hit three digits. Yet.

A question, for you tomato-growers out there. I have a variety of different kinds of tomatoes in my garden -- Romas, cherries, hybrids, heirlooms. I've been getting four or five tomatoes every two or three days, along with a dozen or more cherry tomatoes, in the past few weeks. My plants are pretty well populated with green tomatoes. But for some reason, the ripening seems to have gone on hold, and in the last week, I'd say my tomato take is down to maybe one every three days, and a small handful of cherries. The plants look no different. The green tomatoes seem to be thriving. There's just a ripening hiatus going on, apparently. Anyone have any thoughts on this? On the other hand, the cubanelle sweet banana peppers are producing prodigiously. They're a key ingredient in my tomato relish. And of course, there are the cucumbers. Which, thank all the saints, seem to have slowed down to a manageable pace. I'm getting a couple of zucchini every couple of days, but the yellow squash is slow.

Haven't seen any advance prices that tweak me. Only thing I'm in the market for is a pressure canner, but will certainly scan things to see what other widgets there might be to catch my eye.

Me too.

I believe they use Velveeta; I do for the knockoff Pancho's dip I make, which includes Ro-Tel tomatoes, cumin and garlic powder. I suspect white American would work, too. I've always thought their shrimp Vera Cruz was done with cheese dip, and that, in fact, really sounds good about now. We intended to get down there over the holiday weekend, but didn't.

I read restaurant reviews constantly from places I've never been and am not likely to go. Started that in the food section of the NYT years and years ago, and continue to do it across all sorts of sites.