Roast Beef

You're convinced that your fellow Phillies fans would go batty over your fabulous grand-slam burger, and you wonder how to get your sandwich into the starting menu lineup for Friday's home opener at Veterans Stadium. Talk to Ron Drake. Ogden Allied's operations manager at the Vet has the last word on which foods and beverages get sold there, and Drake is always willing to act on a good suggestion. But he's the first to concede that not all of his picks turn out to be winners. Take non-alcoholic beer, for example.

Paul Klein had been in the deli business for quite some time. One slow, maybe 16-hour day, when he found a few spare moments to really put it all in perspective, he realized it had been more than 30 years. Which was a lot of chopped liver. What most people would think of as a job had become a lifestyle filled with demanding hours and overwhelming pressures. A little more than a year ago, he decided to ease his life a bit, and open a deli-restaurant in Center City. He calls it Pumpernick's.

Ralph Principe wants to know what somebody's done with his 600 pounds of mozzarella cheese. The cheese is missing from Principe's pizza shop in Chester County, along with 60 pounds of pepperoni and a 300-pound meat slicer, police said yesterday. The Great Cheese Heist was Friday. "If I gave you 600 pounds of mozzarella cheese, what would you do with it?" asked Principe, who last month opened Marco's Pizza along Route 100 in Exton. "You wouldn't take it. You wouldn't know what to do with it. " The bewildered Principe, 69, thought he had seen it all at his last pizza shop, which he ran in the Olney section of Philadelphia for nine years.

For Steven Caltabiano, getting fresh coffee and bagels on the way to work once proved quite a challenge. "There was nothing out here," said Caltabiano, 28, referring to a stretch of Route 322. So Caltabiano, a former construction worker, and his brother Al, 32, decided to take matters into their own hands. Literally. Using their combined construction skills and knowledge of gourmet coffee, the Caltabiano brothers renovated an abandoned garage on Route 322 to create the Commodore Coffee & Bagels shop.

THE NCAA Final Four consists of three teams seeded No. 2 or higher, and one seeded fourth. That said, you would think that among the more than five million brackets entered in CBSSports.com's tournament pool, a significant percentage would have a perfect Final Four. Think again. Apparently, a lot people go with the No. 1 seeds. According to the website, only 17,979 brackets - out of 5,136,592 - penciled in Ohio State (No. 2, East), Kansas (No. 2, Midwest), Kentucky (No. 1, South)

Remember Mary Poppins? She blew into London with her umbrella high over her head and a strong breeze of change placing her in front of the Bankses' home. That is how I always imagined Mrs. Burns coming into my life. She lived in my suburban neighborhood and was my Mary Poppins, full of light, outrageous, and still proper as a British nanny. I often found her at my kitchen table drinking coffee with my mother, the laughter drifting through the front door as I bounded in after a day in elementary school.

Because a number of people had spoken highly of the fixed-price lunch buffet at the Wyndham Franklin Plaza Hotel's Between Friends restaurant, a team was formed for an afternoon foray. Personally, I've never been one for buffets - particularly at lunch. Except, of course, if I was vacationing, had the day off or was entertaining for business. Besides, buffets can be pricey for a midday feed and can lead to guilt feelings. Oh, well, it was time for the invasion. Armed with a credit card and hearty appetites, we moved in through the hotel lobby off Vine Street.

One day in 1963, a young Italian named Carlo went to see the beautiful Maria to ask her hand in marriage. Even though they loved each other passionately, Maria's father, Ezio, rejected Carlo and, cursing, kicked him out of the house. Dejected, Carlo walked through the Tuscan countryside, oblivious to the chiaroscuro beauty around him. Overcome with grief, he sank to his knees in tears. It was then, looking down, that he saw a green leaf. In this way basil was discovered. I have invented the sad tale of Carlo and Maria because it is the only way I can account for the sudden appearance of foods, spices and herbs that I had never heard of not so many years ago. Basil is one and so is artichoke and avocado.

On May 8, Minnie Bolds Moore's non-profit organization threw a dinner party for 300 at the Blue Horizon ballroom in North Philadelphia. A King of Prussia rental company contends in a lawsuit that Moore leased 300 plates, forks, spoons and cups and an assorted number of five-gallon display fountains for the affair. Moore, of Conestoga Street near Woodland Avenue, wrote out a check to the firm for $1,074.31, according to the suit. The firm, Main Line Sales and Rental Co., said the check bounced and all of the plates, silverware and fountains are missing.

Township manager Paul Janssen, fresh from a dip in the pool, toweled himself off and promenaded around the picnic grounds, exchanging congenial hellos with the assembled. After he grabbed a quick dinner of rare roast beef on a kaiser roll, he began mentally preparing for the main event of the evening - the touch football game. His preparatory ritual must have worked. "The thrill of victory is incredible," he reflected a few days after the game. Touch football, casual conversation, cold cuts and soda were the order of the day when about 100 Lower Gwynedd officials, employees and their family members took advantage of the fair weather last Thursday to get together for their annual picnic at Gwynedd-Mercy College.