Goodbye Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

A few months ago I went ahead and deleted my Facebook, including several popular pages I had created, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. I just couldn't read the crap that my Facebook friends were writing and sharing. I would see content that was clearly incorrect being shared by people that I thought were intelligent. Initially I tried to warn them by sending a private message and suggest that they should consider deleting their post because it contained false information. Most of them deleted the shared content almost immediately, but I just could not keep up with it.

I must admit, Facebook made it so easy to share information with your friends. I would create posts, go live, call relatives of mine from Greece, and so much more.

People, though, became too political and several times I witnessed heated exchanges of political nature take place. The major reason for leaving Facebook was was the lack of respect they showed regarding my privacy.

So, I deleted my account, removed the app from my phone and moved on with my life.

But, wait, there's more! Many of the unsolicited/spam calls I used to get STOPPED! I used to get three to six calls every day about a variety of business-type of products, especially loans, etc. Gone! Stopped! Hallelujah! Now, at the most, I receive one call per week. Isn't that special!

There was some level of collateral damage because I had created several Blogger posts that linked to my Facebook account. Ach! I had to delete those Blogger posts. Sorry! There were several recipes that I made by going live on Facebook. Gone forever!

Twitter and LinkedIn had to go too. Twitter is just a vile platform that allows people to say anything about anyone.

Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty I am free at last!

Taking a Stroll Down Memory Lane - 0001

For awhile I was whining that because I was running out of matches, I wouldn't be able to grill. My wife and I looked everywhere for the stash of matches but all of our efforts were to no avail. This morning though, while I was sitting around threatening that "without matches I cannot grill," my wife found a bag full of them. Apparently and for some strange reason we collected about 100 books of matches over the years. We went through each one and we literally took a stroll down memory lane.

This blog entry has nothing to do with food and cooking but I have to write about it because it will help me/us heal.

It was the fall of 1982. It was a good year and a bad one too. We made an unsuccessful attempt to move to Greece. As we were flying back to the US, Eileen and I had a conversation about our future. The jobs we had at the time were taking us nowhere and we decided that I had to go to college so I could get a real job afterwards. We talked about it with Miles, my brother-in-law, and he strongly recommended that I attend Erie County Community College because Kodak and IBM were recruiting from that school every year. So the decision was made to move to Buffalo, New York.

In 1982, in Buffalo the unemployment was in the 15% area. Plants: Chevy and Bethlehem Steel, were laying off people left and right and jobs were hard to come by. Since I only knew the restaurant business I started looking for a job. Finally I landed a job at Salvatore's Italian Gardens. I worked there two to three nights a week. The tips were great and the staff was very friendly. Russ, the owner, only fired me once because I failed to come to the restaurant mid-week to check the schedule and I missed going to work one very busy night. He recanted his decision and let me work there again.

My Dad's Gioulbasi - Γκιούλμπασι

In the early seventies my father made a couple of times a dish called Gioulbasi. The name seems Turkish but I am not sure. My father used to compare this dish to λουκούμι, Turkish delight, because the meat was so tender. My dad would make several slits in the meat and insert a garlic clove in each. Then he would wrap a whole leg of lamb in several layers of wax paper and finally wrap that package using newspapers. He would cook it for 2 1/2 hours in the oven. This dish was mostly used as μεζέ, snack when friends and relatives would visit us.

There are several different meats you can use for this and I chose to use a combination of pork and round cubes.
I removed the wrapping material, washed and dried the pork. I used a sharp knife to cut the meat into small pieces.

The round was already cut into small pieces.

This was exciting because I was going to use my Dutch oven. Yes!

Here is my locally grown garlic.

Here is the list of ingredients (left to right):