Some are taken from us way too soon..........

Craig Lindino's Goatee

B. Sept 18 2008 - D. Oct 23 2008 R.I.P.

Craig's Goatee is survived by a wispy mustache and 2 perpetually thin sideburns.

...and somebody won't be coming back next week, if you know what I mean.

FISHFRY was great!

Wish you could've been with us!

I really, really do love FISHFRY night. We're breading fish, we're deep frying hush puppies, making homemade tartar sauce...It's like being a Shriner or in the American Legion Post for one night. I wish i could've got my hands on one of those little red fez's they wear. It was cold and windy outside too, which made it even better. I like cold, windy nights.

We had several types of fish to cook tonight. Flounder, Spot, Whiting, some Blues, and one little bite size Pompano got fried tonight.
the rest of the menu was:
Hush Puppies
Corn on the Cob
Cole Slaw
Desserts
Sweet Tea/Water
To make sure we had enough fish for everybody, we handed out BB-Q Chicken sandwiches for seconds instead of fish. Amy Long donated the BB-Q Chicken to us from what was left over at the Fall Festival.

Why homemade tartar sauce?
Because.....
Normally I go to Something Fishy and say I'm Gary Harris, I do this thing on Tuesday nights, blah,blah,blah ...Can I buy a couple of quarts of Tartar sauce?
Well, the girl usually just gives it to me for free.
And I go there because I can't find it in bulk any where. I don't want to buy 7 jars if I can help it.

But I wasn't able to get to that side of town today to get any.
So I'm thinking "What is Tartar sauce? Mayonnaise and Relish, right? I got 2 big jars of that downtown in the kitchen."
I figured it couldn't be that easy, so I asked someone and they said it also had lemon juice.

Really? That was it?

So when everything got up and going, me and Little Thug (Emory Miller) got out the Mayo, the Relish and the Lemon Juice.

It seemed like the kind of thing you could just eyeball so I started piling mayo into a container, adding relish, and squirting lemon juice.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed Little Thug was backing away from me, as if to say "I take no responsibility for this."

The first quantity was good but it took a couple of tries to get the ratio of mayo to relish right. Then I saw it wasn't enough so I had to toss more in and do it all over again. I had trouble finding anyone to taste it and tell me what they thought. My usual partner in crimes against cooking, John Liverman, was outside working the hush puppies, so I was on my own. In the end it was pretty good.

When no one was looking I added some Texas Pete. I swear we ought to be able to pick up some kind of sponsorship from that crowd, because we use tons of it.

The FISHFRY'ers tonight were
John Ellen J. Boggs Michael Mary Peyson Anna Teresa Brien Twig Jane Tyson Adam Little Thug KK
Laura Frank Candace Morgan me

We saw over 35 at the first stop, which is incredible and makes us nervous about having enough at the second stop. But ...God is good and we had enough for everyone we saw tonight.

It's the time of year when they start to ask about blankets and coats, so if you want to donate any to us, we'll be glad to get them into the hands of people that could use them. You can contact me at 910 6290 5430. Thanks.

Chris Armstrong takes over next week as part of his Graduation Project. he plans on doing Lemon Pepper chicken and mashed potatoes. He'll do a great job. He's already my go-to guy for saying grace and running back down to LEC when I forget something. He's a great guy.

Morgan Campbell will do hers the first Tuesday in December. She'll do fine also. I think she's working on Pizza for that night, which would be a main course first for us.

I'm going to confess something......I gotta take off so I can rush home and watch the 12:00 repeat of The Shield. I could wait 'tli Saturday or Sunday and watch it at Midnight then, but I can't wait that long.

I think Vic and Shane get into it tonight.......

....that's all I really need to get excited.

Blog?

What blog?

Yeah, I didn't blog last week because I wasn't there. Somewhere between walking all over SCare-owinds on Saturday and going to the beach for youth group Sunday night when we got back, I messed up my heel/ankle. I walked on it all day Monday with it hurting and Tuesday morning I couldn't put weight on it. So I laid out of school Tuesday to stay off of it. Since I wasn't at work I didn't figure I should be walking around on it all night Tuesday. I also missed Wednesday, too. (Hopefully, your sympathy should be kicking in about now).

A sore heel didn't mean I couldn't blog, though. My bad.

The reports I got from everyone were great. Lots of folks there to help and
everything went fine. Twig had it all under control. They served Breakfast Casserole and Sausage Biscuits and Gravy at the 1st stop, and Fish Stew and Sausage Biscuits and Gravy at the 2nd stop.

Greg Garrett went to Ocean Isle with his family towards the end of last week and caught a mess of fish. We cleaned them Sunday afternoon and so it looks like this week is gonna be FISHFRY!

FISHFRY week gets me excited. It's fun to do and the people we feed love it.

And, sadly enough,.......

...Fried Baloney and Thanksgiving? It's a natural!

In a continuation of last week's attempt to put as many condiments on cheese grits as we could, this week John Liverman and I took some of the cheese grits we had left from last week and mixed a bowl with this week's tomato soup....and then proceeded to bomb it with Texas Pete and whatever else was handy. It was good and would have been better if we'd had time to do it right and enjoy it but we were rushing to get everything finished and upstairs to the 1st stop.

Quick hits
Craig's goatee is in week 4 and counting.......

Mr. Parker was here this week and OK.

Frank brought us an addition to our utensil collection : a metal stirring spoon long enough to reach the bottom of our biggest pots! A couple of our pots were bigger than our spoons and we were using odd items to get to the bottom of them. I like tongs, but they're terrible to stir with. 3 cheers for Frank!

Chris and Morgan are coming up on the days when they take over and run their own Tuesday night as part of their Graduation Project.

FISH FRY is coming!


Trying to decide what to fix for Thanksgiving. You'd think that was a no-brainer, and in the past it has been - Turkey and gravy...etc
BUT... food comes out of the woodwork at Thanksgiving for the folks we serve and it's all Turkey and gravy....etc. We serve it 2 days before the holiday and we're still not the first to hit them with it.
Now, it's a lot of fun for us to put out the big traditional meal and and cook it and have volunteers cook for us. From our end , there's a real satisfying element to it, but if the ones we're serving are already tired of it, why do it?

So I find myself at odd times of the day thinking of alternatives to fix for Thanksgiving. Hot Dogs, Hamburgers, Spaghetti...nothing has really made me go"That's it!" yet. Nothing might. We'll just have to make a decision and go with it. Suggestions are welcome.

If I'd thought about it, we could have held off with this past week's menu. Think about it,....

pretty awesome to watch Love like that in action on a regular basis.

What a good night! It just was. I couldn't tell you any one huge thing that made it that way but all the little things taken collectively made it that way. Which is good because that means it was a constant stream of good things all night long.

One of the things that made it so good tonight was the work we had to do to fix the meal. We were hopping from start to finish.
We had EGG SALAD SANDWICHES
FRIED BOLOGNA SANDWICHES
TOMATO SOUP
DESSERTS
SWEET TEA
WATER
.....which meant we had to fry about 250 pieces of bologna, boil 170 eggs, toast about 200 pieces of bread (for the egg salad sandwiches. Fried bologna got it straight out of the bag), make 5 gallons of tomato soup, and make 6 gallons of tea. This is how busy we had it tonight; at one point even Brien and Teresa were peeling eggs, and they usually stick to washing and drying during that part of the night!

I didn't think there was a toaster downtown so I was prepared to put all the sandwiches on plain white bread, but Meredith Stricker saw a toaster up under a counter where I would not have looked so......BOOM! ...we started toasting. It was a 4-slotter. How would you like to toast 200 pieces of bread, 4 at a time? That's pretty much what Meredith did. It might've been boring, but it sure smelled good over there.

Meredith used to be Meredith Lynch until she got married and now she lives in Boston with "Chuck". She's been in town for her brother's wedding. I always call her up when we go see the Red Sox play. This summer I got up with them and they took me to a great pizza place near their house. So how do I repay her? By feeding her egg salad and fried bologna, but making her toast bread and peel eggs first. I'm a heck of a guy.

In addition to MEREDITH, tonight there was PEYSON CAMERON PRUDEN CRAIG ANNA BRIEN TERESA MORGAN ANNA (morgan's friend) ELLEN JOHN TWIG MICHAEL JON HILL DAVE FRANK MARY ALAN CANDACE LAURA me working in the Kingdom.

It wasn't a big crowd at the 1st stop but there were 40 in line at the 2nd before we said grace and at least 20 walked up after that.

It won't be long before people will be needing blankets and gloves and toboggans and socks. We will pass those things out as we get them. Right now we just have a few hoodies and a couple of blankets. We pray that God will provide in the way he chooses this winter to help us continue to meet the needs of the folks he sends our way. If you're reading this and want to help in some way, just contact me, Twig or anyone else that comes on Tuesday nights. Everything is appreciated. And feel free to come help us, too.

If you know any of the folks that were here tonight, ask them why they come.
Ask them what they get from it.
Ask them how they feel when they meet someone's need out on the street.
I'm floored by how great these people are at giving their selves away on Tuesday night.
At how caring they are to the people that walk up.
At how good they are at showing God's love to every one that comes throught the line.
It's ....

.... "Let's do stuff on Tuesdays 'cause we know Gary can't come" night

Twig was not here this week. He and Jane have gone on a cruise and are going to finish up in Pigeon Forge and get married this weekend. Somebody suggested we pray for them this week but the general consensus was it's too late, she's already said she'd marry him.



Last time Twig wasn't here we made sloppy joes. That's when John Liverman and I were experimenting with throwing everything we could find in there to give it a little kick. It didn't get that way this week until after the food was cooked. More on that later.



One of the great flip flops in life is eating breakfast for dinner. Honestly, i just don't wake up hungry, so breakfast is not a big meal for me and a lot of times I don't eat any, (I know, I know, you're supposed to.....) which is too bad because breakfast foods are great. That makes getting it for supper a real treat. I say all that to let you know that for supper this week we cooked:
PANCAKES SAUSAGE CHEESE GRITS DESSERT TEA/WATER

Usually when we have Pancakes and Sausage that's pretty much it. This week on the way in to school I went by the church to check on my sausage supply. When I do that, I head toward school on Princess Street, which means I have to go by Parchie's, and If I'm going by Parchie's, well.....I might as well stop and get some breakfast. I got the Grit Bowl Float with bacon, egg, and cheese.

That got me to thinking.
I like grits.
I love cheese grits.
I bet other people love them, too.
Grits are cheap.
A big can of cheese sauce at Sam's is cheap, too.

Plus, you can only have so many people around a grill flipping pancakes and sausage is a pretty passive activity once you put in the oven, but if I had one more thing to cook, I could probably keep everybody busy all night and I'd have one more thing to serve.

You ever made grits?
It ain't hard, but, ...I have delegated it to people before and the results have ranged from soupy to fast acting cement. So it's kind of a "here you go, you're in charge of this and then cross your fingers thing".

Clay Collier, however, knocked it out of the park. The were were just right. By the time we got the cheese in them, man, they were spot on!
And we're talking about 7 gallons of cheese grits.(Two 5 lb. bags)
We had a little more than we could get in our container to take outside, so we had some extra to use as a "taster". Me and Liverman were hitting it pretty hard with the Texas Pete ......and then we found the Parmesan cheese! 2 BIG THUMBS UP! I snuck a little Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ sauce in it too.Very nice.

Alexandra Creeeeeeech-ture Cameron Clay Peyton Chamberlain Anna Pruden Craig Brien John Ellen Michael Stephen Nick Chris Frank Mary Aaron Alan Emory Katherine me were the folks putting it all together.

Mary Dyer and Chris Armstrong were the ramrods that got the pancakes cooked and ready to go- no small accomplishment. A little over 500 pancakes got cooked and we ended the night with about 30 left over.

My friends that needed a preacher weren't there this week, so I'll catch them next week and see if they still need one and we'll go from there.

Quick Hits
Craig still has his goatee.

Mr. Parker wasn't there this week.

Clay suffered for his art this week when some of the grits splashed onto his hand and burned him.

Twig and Jane should be back next week.

God has been very good to us in the ways he has provided for our needs. He has put it on people's hearts to give, he has given people desire to come and serve, and he continually brings us into contact with people who have needs we can meet.

I was looking around at the people who have become a part of Tuesday nights and I noticed that in terms of adults, outside of one or two, most of them are people I met and know mostly through what we do on Tuesdays
That's pretty cool.
Except then I got to wondering if a lot of my old friends were using Tuesdays as ....

NEW LIST

Here we go:

3 TV SHOWS YOU WISH WERE ON 24/7 (but are ashamed to admit it)

Mine ?

Deadliest Catch- I could watch them catch crabs all day long.
Unwrapped- Not always stuff I like to eat, but always cool to watch.
UFC Knockouts- Not fights, just guys getting knocked out. Cool!

Yours?