Greg's blog

Tweaked the ingredients as follows:

2 pounds of ground beef
1 16oz. can of tomato sauce
1 large spanish onion
1 cup of bread crumbs
2 cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon of salt

Notably all I did was get rid of the celery, and double the bread crumbs. Held together much better this way, and no one missed the celery. Think I have a winner here.

First off, let me say that I love meatloaf, but I hate ketchup. Growing up on Chicago hot dogs, ketchup has never been a staple of my diet. To me, ketchup to tomato sauce is what Miracle Whip is to mayonaise. Why mess with perfection by adding a bunch of sugar? So when it came time to make some meatloaf, I started searching for a recipe that had no ketchup. A half hour later, I got up from the computer disgusted, and walked off to the pantry where I grabbed some stuff to try it my own way.

Ingredients:
2 pounds of ground beef
1 16oz. can of tomato sauce
1 large spanish onion
4 stalks of celery
1/2 cup of bread crumbs
2 cloves of garlic
2 teaspoons of worcestershire sauce
1 teaspoon of salt

Instructions:
In a large bowl, mix the ground beef, 1/2 of the can of tomato sauce, bread crumbs, worcestershire sauce and salt. Chop the onion and celery, and add to mixture. Mince the garlic (or use a garlic press) and add that as well. Mix well. Place all of the mixture into a 10" loaf pan (these are considerably bigger than the 9" ones). Pour the remaining half can of tomato sauce on top of the meatloaf. Place into oven preheated to 350 degrees for 40-45 minutes. When finished, pour the grease from the loaf pan, and remove the loaf from the pan to serving dish. Prep time was under 15 minutes. Steamed spinach served on the side, and the total cost was under $10.

I'm not sure I'm happy with the celery as an ingredient, I feel it needs something more than just onion, but I'm not certain that celery is it. No complaints from anyone, and everyone wanted seconds so there was no leftovers, which was good. Will probably revisit this one in the future trying something to replace the celery.

I've used this recipe on tilapia, catfish & trout. Everyone came out great and didn't leave a fishy smell in my house for days on end.

Ingredients:
3-4 pounds of tilapia (around 10-12 filets)
1 large vidalia onion (or whatever your favorite is)
2 tablespoons of olive oil
4 cloves of garlic
2 large tomatoes
2 lemons
salt
white wine
fresh parsley

Instructions. Line a large baking pan with tinfoil (this makes cleanup a breeze). Lay out the tilapia in the bottom of the pan. Sprinkle with a touch of salt. Slice the onion thinly and place into a frying pan with a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Mince the garlic, and add to the onions. Sautee the onions until they soften. Spread the garlic and onions over the tilapia in the baking pan. chop the lemons in two, and squeeze the lemon juice on top of the tilapia. Slice the tomato, and place the slices on top of the tilapia (I slice the tomatos so that I will have two per filet). Chop a small handful of fresh parsley, and sprinkle over the tilapia. Splash a teaspoon of white wine onto each filet (I use vermouth). Place into an oven preheated at 350 for 30-35 minutes, and done. Total cost for the dish is right around $20.

With a large amount of giblets saved up, I decided to make chicken soup for dinner. This is something you can make that will serve 7 for under $10, and you'll have enough left over for another meal down the road at some point.

Ingredients:
Chicken Giblets from 10-12 chickens
1 leek - sliced
2 parsnips - peeled & sliced
2 turnips - peeled & cubed
1 small celeriac - peeled & cubed
4 cloves of garlic - minced
parsely
tarragon

Start with a 8 quart pot. Add all of the chicken giblets, the leek, parsnips, turnips celeriac & garlic. Fill the pot with water about an inch from the top. Add a half handful of fresh chopped parsley, and a quarter handful of fresh chopped tarragon (a couple of tablespoons of dried parsely, and 1 tablespoon of dried tarragon if you don't have fresh). The parsnips, celeriac and garlic are strong enough that you can get away without adding salt and not really miss it. Bring pot to a boil, cover & reduce heat to a simmer and let cook for an hour or so. If you want to add noodles, do so about 10-15 minutes before it's time to server, so the noodles do get too mushy. This soup borders on stew with the large amount of veggies in it (and adding noodles only makes it thicker). Serve it piping hot in a soup bowl with some crusty bread, my wife and kids love it.

Our household has 7 people, my wife and I and our 5 kids. One thing that I always have difficulty with is cooking for such a large number. It's easy if it's a once in a while thing, like Thanksgiving, or a Memorial Day cookout. It's a much bigger challenge when it's every day, and you don't have an industrial size kitchen. The other issue is $$$. It was easy to afford Delmonicos when it was just my wife and I, but we tend towards cheaper dishes nowadays.

I live in Chicago, so although shopping can border on the nightmarish, there's a lot of ways you can save money. First off, we do most of our grocery shopping at Costco. The prices are reasonable for the quality, and when your family can consume over 10 pounds of meat in a week, the bulk packaging is very nice. The second place we shop at is Jerry's Fruit Market in Niles. I can't say for sure what's available whereever you are reading this at, but you can walk into Jerry's, spend 40$, and walk out carrying 20 bags of produce.

A typical shopping trip ends up something like 6 pounds of ground beef, 8 pounds of chicken, 4 pounds of pork chops, 2 pounds of tilapia, 4 pounds of lunch meat, 8 gallons of milk, 8 loaves of bread, multiple boxes of cereal, and other odds and ends. At Jerry's, it's 5 pounds of onions (yellow, white, spanish, vadalia, red, green, shallots), 5 pounds of apples, pears, oranges, grapefruit, plums, peaches (pick 2 or 3 of whatever is in season), 2 heads of lettuce, 1 bunch of celerey, 4-6 green peppers, 1 bag of carrots, 5 pounds of potatoes, 3 pounds of spinach, 3 pounds of broccoli, 1 head of cauliflour, 1 bunch of bok choi, 2 pounds of parsnips, 2 pounds of turnips, 1 pound of celeriac, 1 bundle of garlic, and assorted herbs - basil, oregano, tarragon, thyme, sage, parsley, etc.

That's just about every week. Our average grocery bill a week is around $300 (I'm not going into the list of things like laundry detergent & paper towels here). Our house also currently has 2 full sized refrigerators, a chest freezer, and 8 feet of utility shelving in our basement that we use as a pantry. The extra capacity saves us a lot of time and trouble, because it limits the number of times we have to run to the store during the week for thigns we run low on. Considering that the stores we shop at are over 5 miles from our house, limiting visits to the store is a big deal.

One of the other issues in cooking for a large family is finding pots and pans large enough to cook with. Considering the hectic schedules of my wife and I, I like to cook a lot when I do, ensuring that there's enough leftovers for use on the day where schedules conflict. Finding a frying pan that holds enough food for 7, plus extra for leftovers is difficult, but not impossible. I'll have to post pictures, but I can't right now of my huge frying pan, and my 6 quart sautee pan.

Now for a recipe - chicken cacciatore

ingredients:
2 whole chickens
2 tablespoons of olive oil
2 16 oz cans of crushed tomatoes
1 16 oz can of tomato sauce
2 7 oz cans of tomato paste
1 1/2 cups of a dry white wine (i use vermouth)
1 large onion (i use red - about the size of a 10" softball)
6-8 button mushrooms
4 cloves of garlic (cut this down if you don't like garlic as much as me)
fresh basil
fresh oregano
fresh parsley
(you can use dry if you don't have fresh)
Pasta

First, cut up and skin the chickens (save the giblets for chicken soup, which i'll post some time). I seperate the legs and thighs, cut the breasts into two portions, and only use the drumstick portion of the wing (which i can never skin). Heat up the olive oil in a large sautee pan (I use a 6 quart, and the chicken barely fits). Brown the chicken in the pan for about 15 minutes, turning the pieces every few minutes so they brown evenly - don't worry at this point if the chicken is cooked through or not. Once the chicken is browned, remove from the pan, and slice the onion and place it in the pan. Do the same with the mushrooms. Mince the garlic, or use a garlic press, and add the garlic to the pan. Sautee the onions / mushrooms in the chicken drippings until they start to soften. Place the chicken back into the pan on top of the onions and muchrooms. Add all of the canned tomato products, and the wine. Add your herbs (half a handful if fresh / 1 teaspoon or so of each if dry), and bring to a boil. Once at a boil, reduce the heat to a simmer, and cover. Let simmer for 30 minutes. Do your best to try and stir it every 10 minutes or so (it's not easy). Serve on cooked past of your choice, and voila, all done.

The hardest part of this recipe is cutting up the chickens and skinning them. I use a pair of shears, and it takes me about a half hour. 15 minutes to prepare the rest, and 30 minutes to cook, and this recipe takes at least an hour and a half or so. You could probably get away with using prepackaged chicken thighs or boneless / skinless chicken breasts to save a lot of time, but boneless / skinless chicken anything always seems to be 2-3 times as much as a whole chicken ($1.89 - $2.99 a pound versus $0.89 a pound for whole chickens). It might not seem to be a big deal, but the old adage of watching pennies is certainly true. Plus, there's no giblets unless you buy the whole chicken.

My wife dragged me kicking and screaming into Facebook recently. For me being the techy one, it might sound surprising that she was the one that got the urge to get into it first. It seems that as the years go by, I have been so inundated into the tecnical that I tend now to stay away from it as much as possible. Gone are the hours of sitting in front of the computer playing around with whatever new thing I happened to come across. Still refuse to IM people, and never turn my cell phone on.

It's very strange how surreal reuniting with past acquantinces can be. There was a point in my life when it felt that I hadn't seen these people in forever, and that was back when I graduated college. Here it's 20 years past that point now. Back then forever felt like 5 years, now it's 4 times that.

So you friend people, and say hi, give them a brief update on what you've been up to since high school, and they do the same. You notice the people that have the words "it's complicated" under their relationship. You notice the ones with kids, and the ones that have just bought a house. Then I look at my life, I bought a house 7 years after high school. Back in '92, high school seemed so far in the past that it wasn't worth mentioning. Now when I think about how fast those seven years really were, it doesn't make sense to me. Same with having kids. My first was born in '94 when I was 26. Compared to my parents (who were in their teens when I was born), 26 was old. Now I look at pictures of past friends with their newborns, and mine is starting high school.

Then there's the black holes. The names you remember that don't show up. The remarks here and there about how this one died, and that one died as well. The past faces that you only knew by first name. All the names and phone numbers in the old yearbooks that you never followed up on. You look at yourself, and all the ideals you had, and all the feats you weere going to accomplish. How each one never really came about in the way you hoped. How your goals became less sensational, and much more practical year after year. How something shifted in that you no longer look at what you'll be able to do in a lifetime. Your life becomes more about setting the groundwork for your kids to aspire to be something.

So what are you hearing here? Regret? I'm not sure. I ask myself if I had to do it over, what would I do differently, and don't really come up with anything. I didn't take the beaten path. I made interesting choices that had their own benefits and downsides that any of the other options had. I've been as successful as I possibly could have, I think. I don't know what the issue is. Maybe it's just the dawning realization that life is hardly the happy picture we try to push upon ourselves every chance we get. That life is nothing but a continuous struggle, a worthy struggle, but a struggle. Maybe it's just the recognition that a chapter in my life has closed without my realization that I had already started a new one.

For the first (and unfortunately the last) time, both my sons are on the same baseball team for little league. Their division is the Minors, and encompasses ages 8-10. This is the first stop past T-ball. Bases are 60' apart, roughly 40' from the pitcher's mound to the plate, the kids are pitching up to 40mph or so. Of course there are a number of special rules for this division, in order to keep the games from getting out of hand when there's a large discrepancy in ability between the players. No stealing home, no leadoffs, the play is dead once the ball is being thrown in the direction of the pitcher, etc. My older son has been on this team for the past two years, and this will be his 3rd year (I say "older", as my "oldest" son is 14, and hates sports). My youngest son is coming up after playing T-ball the past 3 years.

Now, I'm probably too hard on my kids, yet I plead frustration. I have 3 sons, 2 daughters (both 3 right now), and 3 dogs. Both my wife and I work full time jobs, and our house often resembles a ticket counter at O'hare Airport. My sons are excellent students, and are very passionate. Unfortunately this passion often takes the form of trying to bash each other's head in with some form of heavy, blunt object, as they tear through the house. Based on this, I've seen what my son's are capable of. How far they are able to push themselves physically. The only thing I really get on my kids is when their intensity on the ball field falls far short of what I've seen them do to each other. Having a sibling of my own, I know all to well the frustrations that can arise, and the desire to express that frustration physically. Having the benefit of a few years under my belt, I also know that there's a time and place to express your frustrations. Much better going to the batting cages, and pretending the ball is a difficult customer's head rather then taking out your frustrations on a loved one. In the same vein I would rather see my sons take their aggressions out on the field rather then attempt to push each other's head through a wall.

Ayway, this year I offered to be an assistant coach for their team. I figured that I was at every practice and game anyway, and had often helped out over the past two years with practices and such, why not? Maybe I could learn something.

We started practicing in the beginning of March. Winter is coming to an end. The weather is trying it's hardest to get nicer. The kids have cabin fever. So we start practice a month early, in the friendly confines of the gymnasium of a local church. We're not so much trying to get a head up on the other teams as much as just getting the kids together, letting them get used to throwing a ball around, and letting them start to gel as a team. We do this once a week, as well as hit the batting cages for an hour. Once April comes around, we head off to the park, and start practicing outdoors. Let the kids get a feel for how the ball responds differently off the mud (it's April) compared to the hardwood floor of the gym.

I think our team is fairly decent this year. We have 6 returning players, and 7 new kids. I think 6 of the 13 kids on our team are 10, 2 are 9, 4 are 8, and 1 is 7. Athletic ability is all over the board, but all the kids seem to hustle and work at getting better. I personally haven't had any trouble or issues with any of the parents, but they tend to communicate with the head coach and not me, so I can only guess that there haven't been any problems so far. It's kind of strange, but just two months into this season I feel a very different attitude towards this game. I've gotten off my hyper-intensive kick with my kids (well, toned it down anyway), and have been focusing a lot more on helping the kids improve, and trying to maike it fun for them. It's harder to tell with the older kids, because the improvement can be so subtle from one week to the next, but the younger kids seem to be doing better every day. Catching more balls, and letting less of them hit the ground. Taking more swings instead of watching pitches.

I have no plans anytime soon of pulling my kids out of sports. I think they've made very good friends through the sports, have gotten themselves into good physical shape, and have steered clear of the XBox & PS2. How much I should get on their case, I'm not sure. I asked my older son once if he thought I got on his back too much. Of course his answer was yes. I explained that I did so because I cared what kind of job he did, and if he would rather I aplauded him regardless if he had a great play, or screwed up completely, and he said no. I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. I've never got on him about results, been disapointed in watching him strike out, or have gotten upset that his team lost a game. I have gotten on his back for jogging to first because he hit the ball right to the pitcher, instead of running as fast as he can, and things like that. I have no delusions that he'll be a superstar in some sport out of college, however I do hope that I can keep him interested in sports long enough to hopefully get some kind of scholarship to help defray the costs of college once he gets that far.