Serves 300. Garnish as needed.

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Ingredients:

80 pounds 90% lean ground beef.

10 pounds instant oatmeal

54 eggs

9 pounds diced baby carrots

8 pounds sliced mushrooms (fresh)

200 ounces pulverized tomatoes

200 ounces spaghetti sauce

12 pounds frozen hash browns

10 steam table disposable pans with lids

Preparations:

Coat the inside of the steam table pans with a spray on vegetable oil like Pam.

Evenly divide the meat in the pans and press flat in pans

Set pans to side.

Dice the carrots into pieces approxmately 1/4 of an inch in size.

Cut mushrooms into small bits, size is unimportant but no whole mushrooms.

Combine the carrots and mushrooms and divide evenly into the pans of meat. Mix well into the meat.

Add oatmeal to each pan, approximately 1 pound per pan. Mix with the blend of meat/carrot/tomatoe.

In a separate pan, mix the eggs, approximately 80 ounces of the spaghetti sauce  and seasonings of your choice (I use a healthy dose of Cajun spices, but Tony Chacheri’s seasoning will do nicely.) Mix thoroughly and then add a healthy dollop of Chile powder and some black pepper and salt. Again, this is to your taste, and if you’re serving a group of people who don’t get a lot of spicy food keep it a little tame.

Once the mix is completely blended, add to the pans and knead into the mix. When you are done you should have a nice, moist mixture but not “wet” by any means. If it is, add a little more oatmeal to the mix until it is solid enough to form.

Mound the pans so that you have  a place around the edges for the juice to collect.

Spread approximately 1 cup of Spaghetti sauce on top of each pan, cover with foil or the lids that came with the pans, and refrigerate overnight.

The morning you are going to serve, heat the oven to 425 and bake the meatloaf for 2 hours with the lid in place. When you are a half hour from serving, spread the remaining spaghetti sauce on top of the meat and let the pans finish without the lids. (keep the lids, because you’ll use them to keep the meatloaf warm and moist while you’re serving your people.

This mix works like a charm. We’ve fed hundreds of people with it. The rest of the meal consists of butter noodles (again, just a touch of Cajun seasoning in the water along with some salt and oil) and canned corn, fresh salad, desert, coffee, water and milk.

We can easily feed 300 people with this recipe and the total cost per guest is under $2.00. It’s much lower if you get donated goods but we just buy it all at Sam’s Club and have a blast doing so.

More on this later when I get up, but wanted to get the recipe up before I crashed for the day.

 

Sometimes Santa is not a nice man.

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Many of you know that I’m a professional Santa Claus. For those of you who didn’t, now you do. This post represents my personal views. It does not speak on behalf of any organization or association of Santas. I stand alone on this and welcome others to join me in this set of principles.

I belong to, have belonged to, and will belong to professional organizations dedicated to ethical and safe behavior as Santa. I carry insurance and submit to a background check annually to make sure that when I’m asked for the proof of my sterling character I can provide it on a moment’s notice. 99% of my fellow Santas are incredible people with spotless reputations and nothing but the best of intentions.

Recently this man,

Matthew Feeney

Matthew Feeney

Matthew Feeney, was accused of molesting children in Minnesota and Massachusetts. Matthew was a casting director, prop master, actor, semi-professional Santa Claus, and a computer geek. It turns out that Matthew had a conviction for this sort of thing back in 1993.

Why does this matter?  Because I know Matthew.  I have been in a short film with him, I have auditioned for him, I have offered him work as a Santa and he offered me jobs when one or the other couldn’t fulfill a request. Fortunately, neither one of us ever accepted the jobs that were offered.

I never suspected him of this predatory behavior. Mug shots always make you look creepy. They aren’t taken at the best of times and you’re a bit preoccupied with what’s happening. I knew Matthew on the good days. I thought he must be a great Santa. He was charming, funny, versatile, and a great guy. On the surface. Below the surface he was one of the most despised things in my world: a child molester. And that’s why I am writing this post this morning.

Matthew is in jail the last I heard. Waiting for what comes. I am free. And I plan to stay that way. One of our local Santa organizations sent out a message yesterday cautioning us to really get to know someone before we bring them into the group. Well, that didn’t work with Matthew. He didn’t join our group, but I wouldn’t have objected if he had tried (prior to his arrest and the revelation of his criminal history, that is.)

So, for the record, I will never offer work to any Santa who does not provide me with a background check and a copy of his liability insurance from this day forward. I will not recommend anyone for membership, ask them to consider being Santa based on my personal knowledge of them, nor invite them to even sit down to dinner with other Santas unless they willingly join a national organization that requires a background check. Once I have that in hand I will consider it as a possibility. Until they go that extra mile, they are suspect.

Parents, ask your Santa for a copy of that background check and insurance. Protect your children. If the daycare you go to wants a Santa to come in for pictures or a party, get the skinny (pun intended) on the man before you let him in the door. If he won’t submit the paperwork, don’t hire him.

I’m writing this at the risk of really making many of my friends very angry. I have no doubt that I will be shunned by many who wear the red suit for putting this on the internet. Almost all of them are fine gentlemen who would never hurt a child. But I can no longer be sure of this without a criminal background check. That won’t weed out the ones who haven’t been caught yet, but at our age (as a group) it’s more than likely that some form of deviant behavior will have surfaced by now.

To my friends: you have sworn an oath in many cases to protect children, just like Nicholas of Myra. I know the membership dues and background checks will be expensive. The insurance even more so for those of you who have retired and are on a fixed income. But that $250 a year that it will cost may save a child from being a broken shell. I cannot chance that terrible damage because I cut a corner and put a job out there that a molester picked up.

Please don’t get me wrong. I want to reiterate what I said at the very beginning of this piece: 99% of the men who portray Saint Nicholas are incredible gentlemen, of good character, spotless records, wonderful with children, and to be held in great esteem. But I have proven in my own life that I cannot spot a child molester by looking at them. Can you? Don’t take the risk. Because sometimes Santa is not a nice man.

 

Goodbye, Old Friend.

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Adios, Old Friend.

IN 1987, a quarter of a century ago, I lived in Spain. On our balcony was a hibachi that the previous tenant had left behind with a chicken-wire cooking surface. It was better than nothing, but the alternatives just weren’t there. The Spanish didn’t worship at the altar of mesquite and you weren’t going to find a barbeque grill anywhere within several hundred, if not thousand, miles.

On a sunny day just like today my wife and I went to the base exchange to get something and as we walked into the outer lobby we darned near fell over. There, right in front of us, was a pile of boxes that contained WEBER grills.

This being 1987, the Navy Exchange didn’t do plastic (or, if they did, we didn’t have the card with us.) We didn’t have the cash to make it happen in our pockets. I left my beautiful bride sitting on top of one of those boxes as I hopped on my motorcycle and headed home to get cash. There was simply no time to waste. These beauties had arrived on a ship, there were a limited quantity, and if I didn’t have cash in hand the pile would be gone within an hour. Word spread quickly when the exchange had something worthwhile to sell.

Thirty minutes later I returned with a fist full of dollars. We paid for our grill and lashed it on the back of the motorcycle. The Spanish Guardia Civil (kind of a national police force) were amused by this giant box on the back of my Yamaha as we went through the customs point outside the base.

I even took a picture of the grill when we put it together so that I could taunt my shipmates who hadn’t been lucky enough to stumble in and find the bounty that day. I still carry that picture in my wallet. On one of my submarine trips I put my photos on my equipment bay. There were several snapshots of my beautiful wife and… the Weber.  The Skipper of one boat was admiring the pictures and stopped short when he saw the grill. He pointed at it and said, “Exactly what is that?”

I proudly replied, “It’s a Weber 70,000 series grill, Sir.”

He walked away muttering. One more member of the “he’s nuts” club had paid his membership in full with the look he gave me that day.

But, after 25 years outside, an Old English Sheepdog who chewed the handles off, countless hail storms, snow falls, rusted ash traps, rusted grill surfaces, a damper that no longer moved, and dents beyond number it was due to go to the scrapyard. In it’s place is a very nice Bubbakeg. It’s a smoker as well.

But it will never be the Weber I hauled around the world.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, Jennifer Bong is a best selling novel writer.

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Ten years ago I started pursuing a career/new venture in doing voice-over work. As a part of that process I looked at lots of web sites and listened to dozens of voice artists. I realized that as a consumer I wouldn’t spend any time on the web pages where they just had links to the “demo” files but no picture of the person. Didn’t matter if they were ugly or not, I wanted to put a face with the voice. That’s not a rational thing, after all you’re hiring them for how they sound on radio or television and you’ll never see them. Blind links are less subjective and a better predictor of how the end user will perceive the voice. But humans like faces. Continue reading →