Cooking Dinner For Multitudes. Or Dinner Every Night At The Sabos.

We get a ton of questions about what it's like at meal time around here. I'm not sure if people are considering inviting us over for dinner and weighing the costs -- literally -- or if they're just curious. As you can see from the above photo, basically it's a box full of veggies every night with several pounds of barbecued beef.* When you are cooking for 16, which I believe is the total number in the Sabo household as of today, it's pretty much all about volume. But technically with a few older kids away at school we're typically only cooking for 13. Piece of cake, eh?

When it comes to preparing meals, I start out by taking all the seats out of our 15-passenger van and then backing it up to the loading dock of the nearest nearby grocery store.** The non-perishables, to include the pastas, cereals, flours and baking products, canned goods and other edible products, are in large boxes on wood pallets that are stuffed into the van with a forklift. We buy the milk in multiple-gallon containers similar in size to small vats. A small vat of milk usually gets us through a few days.

Perhaps by now you are thinking, `Surely he can't be serious!' You would be right. There's no small vats of milk, no forklifts packing our Chevy full of non-perishables and certainly no backing up to loading docks (although that seems to me a pretty good idea now that I think about it). I will say I spend a lot of time at the grocery store. They know me well there. And when it comes to cooking, consider that we have a lot of little kids with little tummies. Except maybe Seth. The other night we got some pizzas (4 larges) and I cut several slices in half for the younger set. Seth, however, got a whole piece. He likes his pizza.

The other night for dinner was clam chowder and fish sticks. The biggest pot in the house was used for the chowder -- we had some leftovers -- and a box of 48 fish sticks was disposed of by the hordes of ravenous Sabos. Is that the way it is in your house?

So taking into account smaller tummies, in theory we're cooking for more like 9 or 10. See! That's not so bad. Now, things change when all the kids are home from school. Those aren't little tummies. Essentially there's foraging occurring in the Sabo kitchen for a solid 18-20 hours a day when everyone is home so it's vital to stock up come Christmas or Thanksgiving. You know how people totally stock up in Virginia when there's word of a hurricane that's heading our way? That's how we treat the times when the older kids return from college. It's hurricane grubbing season.

As for the cost of feeding everyone, well, that's privileged information. Let me put it this way: We have a smaller mortgage. As for how we feed everyone, I have a simple answer: The Lord provides. God has been so good to us over the years in so many ways. We have been blessed abundantly in children, in provision of all our physical needs, in friendships, in memories and so many other ways. It's been a true feast.


*Just kidding! This box full of veggies pictured above was brought to us by friends and we've got big plans for it over the course of several, even multiple, meals that have already begun. The barbecued beef, however, was very, very tasty!

**Just kidding! I don't actually take ALL of the seats out of the van before backing it up to the nearest nearby grocery store.

Go Fourth And Blow

In celebration of Independence Day, all eyes along the Atlantic seaboard are on Hurricane Arthur. It appears at the moment that Arthur is going to stay well offshore, which means things will be fairly normal for the holiday. If you count thunderstorms and horizontal rain as normal. The forecast still calls for plenty of wind and rain on the Fourth, making the prospect for enjoying the holiday less than tantalizing. Grilling some dogs and burgers may be a bit dicey and we're also in the market for rainproof fireworks. Maybe we'll just light them off indoors so the kids don't miss out. Just kidding!

Life out here on the East Coast the past decade is so different from Oregon. I remember out there in Corvallis getting a handle on the weather by looking to the west. If I saw clouds, it's probably going to rain. If I didn't see clouds, it might rain. If I saw a mix of clouds and blue sky, it might rain. Now when I lived in Bend or Prineville on the dry side of the mountains, I still looked to the west. But didn't figure it would rain no matter how many clouds I saw.

Here in Gloucester, though, I never know where the weather will come from. It could be a Nor'Easter, a hurricane or tropical storm sweeping up from the south, or a tornado or derecho bearing down on us from the west. I had never even heard of a derecho until we moved out here. Nor did I pay much mind to hurricane season. That's all changed. We've had storms drop up to 10 inches of rain in one day -- that's a year's worth in Bend and Prineville -- on us and a violent thunderstorm with 2-3 inches of rain in short order isn't unusual. We've had tree limbs go through our bedroom window at midnight in a storm, a tree fall on our neighbor's house in a tornado, a run-of-the-mill thunderstorm send our last grill cartwheeling through the yard and for good measure we've had an earthquake, an EF-3 tornado and thundersnow.

We had one hurricane blow through a few years ago at a time when we had two visitors from Oregon. Two friends also opted to bunk over at our house, for some reason they thought it was safer in a house where people are packed in like a jar of pickles, and so we had somewhere around 19, maybe 20 people in the house. I had them all stay toward the front side of the house away from the trees in the back yard. No one got hurt, everyone was safe and what I remember most is hustling over to our neighbor's house to help him out when a tree went through his roof.

I don't remember that type of stuff in Oregon. Nor do I recall any runs on groceries when bad weather was on the horizon. Out here, the mere mention of a hurricane, or snow, or any related natural disaster  sends people in droves to the store to stock up on water, bread, milk and eggs. It can get a little crazy and I hesitate to take to the kids to the store for those trips. It might get kind of dangerous. I guess it's all part of the adventure. As Ezra used to say, "That's just the way it be's."