Oh this is good – I recognize a lot of the songs they used in this set.

I’ve followed the channel for some time. It usually has a playlist attached

So when it comes down to cooking my favorites are to bake or roast things. Something about applying several hundred degrees of heat to cook things.

So lately I’ve baked 3 loaves of Amish Bread. Here’s the latest with some changes.

1. Instead of granulated sugar I used the same amount of Agave. The yeast doesn’t seem to mind at all in fact I think it prefers the Agava syrup to the granulated sugar.
2. Instead of baking it in the big oven – I brought the convection toaster oven up to 350F and slid the loaf pan in there. When I baked in the big oven I had to brown it with a Searzall tool. Not so in the toaster oven:

   That’s a beauty right there. It’s cooling in the pan right now.

   Big difference using the convection oven though. That’ll be my go-to for breads from this point on. Speaking of which need to get more bread flour.

I love warm nights. I don’t know what it is, some of my fondest memories are of warm nights with friends, out camping and the like.

Time was I loved going camping. Call me nature boy if you dare or must. And I’d love to do it again. But most of my travel these days is in hotels and that’s not camping by a long shot. Plus I need to purchase a new tent and sleeping bags.

And my version of camping – a tent, sleeping bags a fire area or pit with grill. You know, roughing it. I love that. It’s not that I wouldn’t mind an RV with full out beds and stuff but there’s something about communing with nature that appeals to me.

And I’ve camped all over New England, in Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Maine. It’s all beautiful country even if it is the land of many big rocks.

I recall one New Hampshire trip when I was a teenager. Let’s just say four guys, 11 cases of beer. The major crisis was when we ran out of beer by the 3rd day. But the joy of it – behind the camp site was an ice cold stream. Following that stream we found a bunch of huge rocks where the water would pool up. By noon the Sun would warm that water right up. It was awesome.

I better stop – memories like that stir up the motivation to go out into the wilds again.

Here I am blowing up a Neoprene glove before I mix the beef and pork for a meatloaf.

From this aspect I look very much like my paternal grandfather. Someone says it’s not so but I can see it clearly.

So the thermometer reads 98F with a feel like of 112F. I went out in it. Sweated a fair amount as I was carrying about 25 lbs of stuff.

I’ve always said I’d rather sweat then freeze. And I mean it. I like it hot, always have. Welcome to July.

So we went to turn on the air conditioner in the living room and no air was blowing out of it.

Weird – so do what I always do with misbehaving. For example I know what air conditioners are – they’re effectively heat pumps with a high pressure and low pressure system.

Took about a dozen screws out of the AC case – dumped the water out of it from the rain yesterday and turned it on while it was on the bench. Now the fans worked – I spun them by hand before I powered it up so maybe some bad lubricant or such.

It powered up just fine, fans ran, compressor ran. All is good so cleaned the case and blew out the coils.  No signs of coolant leak.

Re-assemble it and everything down to a level 5 torque on the screws.

We now have Air Conditioning in the living room.