Have Some Balls: Make It High Impact

When I was a young boy, I was passionate about any activity that revolved around playing with a ball. Baseball, football, basketball, just about anything.

I’d throw around a tennis ball if that was all I could find. I was fond of kickball as well.

One of my favorite activities was to throw pitches with a rubber baseball against the brick wall of my grandparents’ house, on their back patio. Like many other boys my age, I would pretend I was one of the great pitchers of the day, gunning for that all important strikeout.

I could do that for hours, until I was drenched in sweat. I never thought of stopping.

Occasionally, I would play ball with friends right in the middle of 14th Street, where I grew up, pausing only enough to let the infrequent car pass down the street. Back in the 1970’s, there wasn’t the traffic that there is now on a side street in my city.

Playing in my grandparents’ yard, I injured my ankle once sliding into a imaginary home plate, gashing it on a rock that I didn’t see, requiring a trip to the hospital to get stitches.

It put me out of commission for awhile after I hurt myself. But I knew I had to get back to playing ball as soon as I possibly could, bad ankle or not.

Although I don’t remember it, I’m sure I was out there a week or two later, stitches and all, ready to go. As far as playing ball was concerned, I never wanted to stop.

When my parents bought a house a couple of miles outside of the city, I went to a different school and made some new friends. With some of those guys, I recall afternoons spent in our yards, throwing footballs, playing impromptu games of two hand touch in the snow.

The point of these examples above? I realize that back then, I was involved in more activities that I was fond of, rather than the alternative of things that you should do, which we tend to do more of when we’re adults that are all grown up.

Playing ball so much when I was younger was what I refer to as a high impact activity. Maybe it doesn’t make you money, but instead moves you forward in some way while increasing your “enjoyment” factor.

High impact activities for me now include cooking, reading, exercise, researching high impact people, and planning upcoming vacations for my family.

High impact equals quality. Spending time with my wife and kids is the most high impact thing I can do. In the end, isn’t it all about quality?

It’s important to make the distinction of things you truly have to do (such as providing for your family, taking care of your health) vs. things you want to do or should do. You need to take care of business, but don’t should on yourself, regardless of what others think (read a great article about that here).

Speaking of providing for your family, you don’t necessarily have to love your job or your work. I wrote about that here. You should, however, have a fondness for the other things in your life if you don’t love your work. Take a good long look at your activities outside of your job or business. Are they high impact? Life’s really too short to consider anything else.

Nowadays, although I don’t play ball as much as I used to, I try to get it in as often as possible. Having a ten year old son who loves his Little League makes it a lot easier. And it’s important that I still partake in what I loved to do as a kid.

To keep yourself youthful, make it high impact . Have some balls. And have fun!

Let me know in the comments section how you may be keeping things “high impact”!

Absolute Requirements of the Italian Kitchen

Fellow blogger Vince Scordo published this great article about what food ingredients are really required to have a complete kitchen, and to keep those of us of Italian American descent happy and content.

Although I loved Vince’s post, I wanted to add my two cents on some of these required ingredients and what they mean in my kitchen. My kitchen, and what it holds, was strongly influenced by what my grandmother taught me, as you will see in the following…

Garlic – One of two main ingredients in my gram’s kitchen, it was mandatory that there was an abundant supply ready for peeling and chopping. She used it to cook just about everything, and I have carried on that tradition. As far as rituals go, the preparation of the garlic may have been second only to the cleaning of the green beans.

Olive Oil – The other main ingredient. The kitchen was never without a shiny gold and black can of Filippo Berio, and Gram used it liberally for cooking, as well as dressing salads, bread dip, and general illness prevention. Although my wife and I will occasionally enjoy a nice extra virgin oil drizzled on a tomato & mozzarella salad, I always fall back on the Berio product for its flavor and friendly price point.

Tomatoes – I use 28 oz. cans of store bought crushed tomatoes as a rule, flipping back and forth between some different brands. Gram, however, canned her own, using hundreds of roma tomatoes from a local farmer. The sauce that she made with them is something I could not duplicate if I tried.

It took an amazing amount of back breaking work for her (and anyone that helped) to prepare the tomatoes for storage, and she would make a year’s supply. If you’re not into that kind of manual labor I recommend a nice canned product off the store shelf such as Red Pack or Tuttorosso, which is frequently on sale in my area.

Imported Tuna – All you lovers of the Bumblebee and Starkist brands, fair warning: one try at a high quality, Italian tuna packed in olive oil in a salad or on a sandwich, and it’s highly unlikely you’ll go back to the other brands. Yes, they are a little more pricey, but it is well worth the extra change that you’ll spend!

Cheese – My gram’s favorite road trip was to go to our local import store to buy some olives, mortadella, and a couple of pounds of asiago or imported parmigiano cheese. Sometimes it was more than a couple pounds. When we got back from the store, we’d sit at the kitchen table and have lunch (sandwich and coffee), and then I’d grate some cheese for that night’s dinner or for future use.

Fruit – A terrific memory that I have is the fruit bowl that was always present on the counter at my Gram’s house. It was always filled with apples, grapes, and especially pears, which we loved to peel and eat at the kitchen table.

In addition to the bowl, the yard around the house was filled with fruit trees that yielded pears, cherries, and peaches. And the grapes. Not one, but two arbors dense with the sweetest concord grapes that my wife and I, to this day, make grape jelly with.

If you’ve never had Italian bread toasted with peanut butter (or plain butter) and homemade jelly, you have not lived.

Wine – My grandmother, as well as the rest of her family, was no wine snob. The wine that was at table was usually a full bodied red that came in a very large bottle. Read: gallon jug, usually something like Carlo Rossi. It tasted great along side a dish of macaroni with my gram’s sauce, salad, and Italian bread.

Although I tend to enjoy a variety of white and red wines from Italy, France, and California, more often than not my wife or I will go to the store and pick up a gallon size bottle of red to enjoy with a favorite Italian meal…and we love it!

And in the end, isn’t that what food is about?…love!

How To Take Nothing For Granted

What do you take for granted?

Gratitude has been a theme that I’ve posted about here before, and I’ve thought recently about things that I should be grateful for, but sometimes take for granted.

One thing I’ve normally taken for granted, because its always been good, is my wife’s overall health and well being. This changed recently when she had a visit to our local ER with some tightness in her chest, and shortness of breath that we originally attributed to pine pollen.

There’s a history of heart disease in her family, and on our doctor’s suggestion, we decided to be safe rather than sorry, and go to the hospital. Even if pine pollen was the possible culprit.

Although she looked great in a hospital gown (she could look good in a paper bag), the both of us would have rather not been there. Aside from the events of having our kids, my wife does not go to hospitals, or doctors’ offices.

While waiting for test results, I was hoping for the best, but there was cause for concern. It is a subject I’ve never thought about much: I’ve always taken for granted that my wife would always be healthy, and be around to take care of us.

I’ve always looked after my own health. Fighting with elevated blood pressure and high cholesterol, it’s part of my game. My wife didn’t need to be concerned about such things, or so it seemed.

Thankfully, all of the tests (we’re talking blood, CT scan, EKG, etc.) came back with good results, and this was a scare we no longer had to worry about. I’m very grateful for the test results that portrayed her as an almost perfect physical specimen, and promised myself I’d always show gratitude for her health as long as she has it.

Something else happened here. I realized there are many other times that we all take most things for granted. It seems as we get older, we have to come to terms with that sometimes the most important facets of our life are the ones we assume will be a constant.

I thought about little things that I’ve taken for granted, that I can no longer experience. Like the hundreds of times my grandmother made me coffee, and poured it at her kitchen table. And sliced a piece of cake to go along with it.

That was a normal part of life for me, always there. So it got taken for granted. You can reflect on the past, but that experience is now gone. And with that realization, you should be more aware of what goes on now.

I make the coffee now, or my wife makes it. We do it the same way my Nonna did, brewing it with the espresso pot on top of the stove (it’s the best way to make coffee!), and it still tastes great. It’s just different.

A few weeks ago, I was walking through my dining room, and accidentally kicked my son’s baseball cleats that were left by the table. Ordinarily, I would have only noticed it in passing, but I stopped to look at them, and to think.

I thought, those shoes will only be there briefly. Someday, they will be gone, replaced by bigger shoes. And then, when my kids are grown and out of the house, they won’t be there at all. There will be just an empty space on that floor.

I took in that moment, without it being taken for granted. And I was happy to have it.

The little things in life are truly amazing, when you take the time to consider.

I feel like a cup of coffee. Right now.

It’s Like A Heat Wave

The northeast region of the country where I live is now in the middle of some excessively hot weather. The temps have flirted with the high nineties, and the heat index was, in the last couple of days, in the triple digits. These are the kind of days where it’s difficult to just stand around without sweating profusely, let alone be involved in an activity or have to work outside.

The intensity of this savage heat made my wife think of my grandmother. As we talked about her, the memory made me laugh. My Nonna was famous in our family circles for wanting to make any company she had in the house a volcanic cup of coffee in the most oppressive of conditions. And there was no refusing. You had to have one, or she would be disappointed. Hopefully, you didn’t sweat too much into the coffee, changing that great taste.

It’s my opinion that my grandmother was more famous for the other operations going on in the kitchen on summer days with searing temperatures. She loved to boil a large pot of spinach or escarole on the stove as the outside temperatures were reaching their afternoon peak, making it seem hotter indoors. She was a non-believer in the high technology of air conditioning, and although she had a stand alone fan, she wasn’t big on those either. Too much of a breeze.

In that kitchen, there was no air movement whatsoever. You felt like you were a couple of steps closer to the sun. Or Hell.

And if you were really lucky, the stove top wasn’t the only thing cooking. There may have been a tray of chicken cutlets in the oven, baking away at 400 degrees. That kitchen was not going to get cooler until it was dark, and the moon was in full view.

When you took a seat at the table, melting into your chair, you knew what the first question was going to be. I always did. In the full throttle of a hazy and humid August day, you dreaded it just a little bit.

“Joey, you wanna nice hot cup of coffee?”

Memory is a child walking along a seashore. You never can tell what small pebble it will pick up and store away among its treasured things. ~Pierce Harris, Atlanta Journal