Just a quick note that I am still alive, out in Arizona now and recovering from a wicked stomach virus that hit my daughter and then me. If any of you should find yourselves in Phoenix and in need of urgent medical care for your child, I can recommend Phoenix Children’s Hospital. I’m hoping to have a regular post up later today.
Also, there have been some questions regarding how comments work here. If you’ve had an approved comment here before, then your future comments are posted without moderation, although I do see them as they come in. The exception is comments with links – any comment with external links in it is held for moderation, so on Thursday, when I was traveling all day, a few comments were held for over 24 hours while I was offline. I also use a spam filter on comments and for whatever reason, it takes a dislike to certain users, so if you’ve posted legitimate comments and haven’t seen them on the site, that may be the reason why. Just keep trying.
Thanks…
Sometimes traveling is tough, especially with children. Hope to get better, you and your daughter.
At least they won’t be able to say your full of sh*t……
here’s to the hope of a speedy recovery
Keith,
Hey, this doesn’t really have anything to do with this post but I didn’t know how else to get a hold of you(I looked for an email, but not very hard). I was really just wondering if you could recommend a book for learning how to cook. I have never really cooked before but wanted to learn. I was wondering if you had any suggestions. Thanks.
Mike-
I’m sure Keith will come up with a book, but my advice is to ask for friends for a couple of basic things that they like to cook and experiment with them. Personally, I found it very liberating to take a vague template for beef stew and make it my own.
Here it is, the world’s easiest and most flexible beef stew template:
you need
beef for stew (ask your butcher)
stew vegetables
a big bottle of V8
some instant tapioca (to thicken the stew)
I like to go with onions, potatoes, carrots, celery, and parsnips. Cut ’em up so they’re all about the size of baby cut carrots from the bag, put them in a deep casserole dish with the meat, about two tablespoons of the instant tapioca, and enough V8 so it almost (but not quite) covers all of the veggies and meat. Stir it up and throw it in the oven at 325 for 3 hours (stirring once an hour) and you’re done.
It sounds too simple to be good, but it’s f’ing great, and you can adjust it however you want – more meat/less meat/more liquid/less liquid/tons of carrots/etc etc
good luck
Hey Keith, I was at Hohokam on Saturday for the Diamondbacks game and tried the Italian Sausage Sandwich. I was really underwhelmed by it. I know its just ballpark fare and I shouldn’t expect too much but it was really bland and the peppers and onions were soggy and weak. I was hoping for something a little more Chicago-like. What have you had that you can recommend? I will be hitting up Diablo later this week and Tucson Electric next week.
Sorry it’s a day late, but hope you’re feeling better. Do you stay in Arizona the whole spring or do you make your way to Florida, too?
Welcome to AZ Keith!
baileywalk – I’ll only be in AZ this spring.
Justin – Can’t recommend much for ballpark food in the area, since this is my first run through AZ spring training. So far I’ve tried the soba noodle place down the 1b line at Scottsdale (quite good for ballpark food) and the Moe’s stand at Tempe (acceptable; didn’t see a better option).
Glad to know that both you and the little one are in good hands. I checked myself into the hospital on Thursday morning with what I thought was a stomach virus but ended up in surgery having an emergency appendectomy. Due to complications I just checked out this morning. The upshot to this? Free hospital wi-fi allowed me to catch up on my blog reading. After working through your archives at the worldwide leader and some stuff I had missed over here I moved on to Joe Posnanski’s. I just want to thank you for turning me on to Joe’s blog, I think he’s one of the best columnists it the country sports or otherwise. I have been familiar with his newspaper stuff for years but I only recently started reading his blog after finding it linked here. I was in the hospital for five days so I only had time to finish three of Joe’s blog posts but I should I ever need a transplant or an angioplasty I might finish two more.
Speedy recovery to you and your daughter.
Feel Better my man. I am still shocked everyday that ESPN actually has someone like you on their staff… I mean that in a good way.
Thanks for the well wishes, guys. Will, I hope you’re doing better too. Emergency appendectomies are no fun – a good friend of mine had to have his appendix out under similar circumstances and was out of commission for a week.
Keith,
Hope you’re feeling better. Sounds like you might want to keep away from Rocco Baldelli. The mix between his metabolic disease and your stomach ailments might not be a good mix. Speaking of which, have you heard anything like this before?
Francis