Bread baking and puppy snuggling

Yesterday my friend stopped by. They are trying to purchase a home less than 5 minutes from us (yippee!!!) and she needed to be close by the new house to meet up with the guy that was going to turn on the gas for them. I told her to stay as long as she liked and to my delight we spent the majority of the day together. She's 8 months pregnant and had packed enough snacks
to feed a small army so we made eggs and sausage when she arrived then we set about our tasks. She doing paper work, me organizing grocery lists, coupons and store ads. David and I are adhering to a strict budget, so I am even more attentive to sales and coupons than usual. (Today I went shopping and saved over $10 in coupons alone. More than 10% of my entire grocery bill!) In the late afternoon we went over to their new house and met up with her husband and the utility guy. The guys went to town on the appliances and what not. Judy was hungry and she generously bought me a delicious early dinner/later lunch of tamales at a nearby Mexican place David and I have yet to try. I love tamales. I basically critique an entire Mexican restaurant experience on their tamales alone. In addition to great service, they had fabulous tamales and really reasonable pricing. I made whole wheat bread yesterday as well. My recipe calls for non-fat dry milk. I've been using the same small box I purchased a year or so ago. The box, however, had fallen apart so I had relocated the powdered milk to a different storage system. I think the milk had expired. My bread didn't have the usual flavor, not bad necessarily, just different. Hubs and I had two pieces each last night and still couldn't figure out the problem. I'm fairly certain it's not the flour because I used it just a week or so ago and it the product was perfect. And so, from now on I will be marking the expiration date of products on my new packaging material. I haven't ever done that because I bake so frequently that I use products far in advance of their dates. Perhaps not the case with this powdered milk bit. When I looked for more today on my above mentioned shopping trip they had only huge boxes of the stuff. I am going to look elsewhere because I tend to rotate the breads I make and clearly don't use much of the milk. Last night I was reading one of the books David got me for Christmas when the doggies decided it was a good time for a snuggle. One of my favorite things about having doggies is the snuggling love they give!