Tomorrow  I will be using some leftover beef roast to be the base of my dinner sandwich.    I have more salad fixings so that works out too.

Thin sliced beef, beef broth, onions, peppers.  Saute onions and peppers when tender add broth and beef heat through.  Drain, serve with tortillas, shredded cheese and salsa.    Salad or something else to go with this and I’m all set.  Or I could use some of the rolls from today and serve it au jus, skipping the salsa.  That of will depend on how I feel.

I will be making a trip to Fort Wayne Thrusday and Friday, so I may not have homemade sandwiches for those days.  It all depends on when I get home.  Thursday night is also play rehearsal so  that limits the amount of time I can spend in the kitchen.  There are quicker things to put together, and of course the easy way out  — hitting some fast food place.

I’m having fun putting together some quick ‘meals’ and sharing them, I hope you can try one or two on your own.  I’m also open to any suggestions.

Thankfully, the game really did not get started until I got off work at 9.  Up until then, the Yanks and Angels were scoreless through three, but that was soo to change.  Game 4 in the ALCS featured a remarkable one-two punch for the Bombers.  C.C. pitched eight incredible innings allowing one run on five hits on a short three days rest and giving the much used bullpen a rest of its own.

Alex Rodriguez with all the turmoil he has been in this year off the field has never had a better post season.  I cannot forget his arrival in the pin-stripes.  He was terrible in the post season.  This year… 5 home runs, 11 RBIs.  Tonight he was a triple away from hitting a cycle including a two run smash.

Last night’s questionable use of the bullpen and tonight’s even more questionable calls made by the crew chief along the third base line are now a distant memory as the Yankees are one victory away from THE WORLD SERIES.  Now… I just have to concentrate on other things until Thursday night (of course that will not be a problem for me… sorry guys, you will have to take a back seat until 9).  Hopefully, they can wrap it up Thursday night so I can go a-haunting this weekend safe in the knowledge that they will be back in the Big Apple waiting for next Wednesday.   But… it is not over yet.

For anyone not in the know… Yankees 10, Angels 1.

And today is the 99th birthday for the longtime former voice of the Yanks, Bob Sheppard.  In homage, Captain Jeter has Mr. Sheppard’s recorded voice announcing him every time he steps up to the plate (at hime, anyway).  Can we get a “Yankees win!   THAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA Yankees WIN!” Mr. Sheppard began announcing in the ’51 season with none other than greats like Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra leading the Bombers to another World Championship.

I thought I could just add a comment about my sandwiches this week, but why waste a good blog post. 😉

I’m in the mood for something different today, so today’s sandwich has no meat.  I picked up some Portabella  Mushrooms (the big ones), a sweet onion, tomatoes, and Munster cheese.   For bread I picked up some hard rolls.

To start I sautéd  the onion.  I then put these off to the side while cooking the mushrooms.  The mushroom was brushed on both sides with olive oil.  I started cooking with the gill side down for a couple of minutes.  I’m just heating through on this side.  I then flip the mushroom, fill with onions and top with a slice of munster cheese.  At this point I brush the roll with olive oil and brown the insides.   When done, slid the mushroom between the two slices of the roll.  Salt and or pepper can be added to the gill side of the mushroom before adding the onions.

A slice of tomato made a nice addition to the sandwich.

This goes very nicely with a spinach salad.

That started with some baby spinach, shredded carrots, diced onion, slivered almonds, thin sliced radishes and mandarin orange segments.  I’m cooking for one today, so I don’t have measurements for this.  I just made enough for me.   A ginger dressing completed the salad.

So what’s for dinner?

A while ago, I came across an extremely cool website – it was an alphabetical list of animals and which zoos in the world had the species on display.  My computer since crashed, launching my previous list of bookmarked sites into a cyberspace void.  I’ve been trying to find this site again lately, but to no avail.  I know some fellow tangenteers are good at doing research and also like a good challenging hunt.  The prize?  Getting to use the list to locate the zoo of any animal species you wish 😉

Oh yeah – and you win my thank you.

I’ve been waiting to post until I catch up on reading my friends’ blogs, but I am realizing that if I do that I will never post.  Sorry Taylhis, Jamiahsh, JustJ, Whatever, and even MareMare whose blog I haven’t read in over a month!  Sigh… Where does the time go?  I have a couple of normal things I want to blog about, but that will have to wait as geek.com has just now posted on a third video from the maker of the car from the past we know as Herbie the Love Bug, Volkswagen.  They have decided to take up the cause of environmentalism and try to change people’s attitudes through what they call the Fun Theory.  A couple of weeks ago they started with trying to get people to burn their own energy by using the stairs instead of the escalator.  I remember my days of visiting malls and seeing the stairs used only infrequently when they were next to an escalator.  Often though, I would use the stairs simply because they were faster than waiting behind someone on the escalator.  Of course, if there was no one on the escalator I would climb up or down them like stairs to be even faster since the stairs were moving.  Anyway, see what they did in this video:

Next, they added something to a trash can to get more people to throw their litter away:

Just today I learned about their newest video.  This one involves a bottle collector, something I have yet to see around here.  For that matter, I don’t know of any sort of effort to collect recycling outdoors.  Many places like schools have some sort of indoor recycling of course, but that’s far from a large-scale municipal effort.  Is it just my area?  Surely we’re doing it somewhere in the US?  Of course, being a European company Volkswagen made these videos on the other side of the pond we know as the Atlantic Ocean, so it may well just be a European thing.  Meet the video game bottle collector:

The videos are actually larger than the small window we get here on Tangents, so you will probably want to click on them to open them up on their Youtube pages.

Yep… once again… an extra inning pitching duel.  Captain J started off the afternoon just after 4PM with a single homer.  A-Rod, Johnny D, and Posada added their own throughout the game.  However, single HRs often do not win games, correct?  I do think the Yanks went a bit too deep in the bullpen… but that is just a bit of armchair coaching.  Final: Yankees 4…Angels 5 in 12.  At least it was a late afternoon game unlike Saturday night into the wee hours of Sunday.  Game 4 Tomorrow Night 7:30… C.C. back on the hill!!!!!!!

The Bears are 3-0 on Sunday afternoon and 0-2 on Sunday night.  They played the Falcons this week – they lost.  What else needs to be said.  As always, since 1985, the Bears are inconsistent at best.

UGH!

We visited our local zoo this weekend (to feed my zoo addiction, it had been awhile), and when I  got home, as usual, I decided to research some of the animals we observed.  As I was researching these animals on the internet, I came across some ultra-cute baby animal pics, and I thought I might make a fun game on my blog of having people guess which animal is what type of baby – HAVE FUN!  Don’t worry about posting your guesses – other people can just ignore them or use them as hints if they get stuck.

Here is an added picture of the same type of animal, a little older – per a request in the comments for a better picture:

Now I want a sandwich.  I’m watching a show about sandwiches.  Roast beef of all kinds and now a ground beef sandwich that isn’t a burger.  It looks like a sloppy joe without the sauce.  Just cooked ground beef.  It looks good.   It is just amazing the number of ways you can make beef sandwiches.  On to Philly Beef Steaks and Hoagies.

I’m not sure how somebody got a job traveling around the country tasting various sandwiches.  Can I have that job.   Ok, maybe not.  Some of these sandwiches look just bad.

Now this got me thinking of my favorite sandwiches.  I’ve written about my comfort foods before, so I may have to give a list of just sandwiches.   I guess I’m thinking of things that you normally won’t find in restaurants.     I guess this week, I will try a few sandwiches and see what I like the best.

Ok, so who had a haunted house in their neighborhood when they were a kid?  For us, it was a haunted road located in a Chicago suburb about 15 minutes away from ours.  Actually, my group of friends were from a few different area high schools, and we  had all heard of Munger Road from kids at our schools.  Back in the ’90’s when such haunted tales were spun that made us actually want to visit, the road was a deceptively secluded partial dirt side street that ran through a forest preserve and connected two main thoroughfares.  At night, the road was dark, isolated, and spooky.  There were many rumors about the incidents that took place on Munger, but here is the basic story:  There was a little house right next to the railroad tracks.  The ghost story said that the man who lived in the house was mowing his lawn when he was hit by a train.  I can’t remember if the train supposedly derailed or if the man got too close or what happened, but his ghost was said to haunt this area, along with ghost trains.

It was a fun place for our group to check out while we were in high school, and we did note some strange happenings.  We would see mysterious headlights that would disappear (there was no place for a car to turn off the road!).  My friends had a police scanner in their car, aka, a fuzzbuster, and the thing would go berserk down Munger.  Because it was a dirt road, our cars would come out very dusty, but once there were distinct handprints on the trunk.  Now as an adult, I can think of scientific explanations for this, but at the time, it was scary!  There was also the time a cop came out of nowhere (we had been up and down the road several times and didn’t see him), pulled us over, but he was really nice about it and sent us on our way.  I found it odd at the time because we had about seven teenagers stuffed into my friend’s teeny little hatchback car, and the police officer didn’t even say anything about it, much less write us seatbelt tickets.  For months afterward, we would tell the story and call him ‘the Scooby Doo cop’.

In recent years, I’ve heard that the house has been torn down, and I wonder if kids still go there.  Unfortunately, there has been at least one homicide around the area of Munger Road, which adds a whole new element to the fright.  During our haunted house tour in Illinois the other weekend, we drove within yards of Munger, but we didn’t stop – we wanted to see haunted house attractions!  Besides, I don’t even know if the area has the same sort of spooky appeal it had over a decade ago now…

I’ve found a little bit about Munger on the internet, including these stories, but I have yet to add my own.  Maybe next time we’re in town we’ll drive by, just to see how the area has changed and what has become of Munger…

So it’s finally Halloween, time to share your own ghost story, or tales of rumored haunts near where you grew up.  Add them to the comments section below, and have a HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!