Tag: Gluttony

I Hate This

Food & Drink, Lifestyle, Two-Minute Hate

From City Journal:

Restaurants supply physical nourishment, but their ultimate contribution to life is spiritual. From the bonds forged with dining partners to the camaraderie shared with fellow patrons to the banter exchanged with staff, dining out is a social, aesthetic experience. But QR codes are ruining it. More than a superficial nuisance, they are a sign of cultural decline.

Whenever I go to a restaurant and am confronted with this nonsense, I ignore it and demand to get a paper menu.  Usually, I get strange looks from the staff and eventually get a plain photocopied list, with no pictures of the dishes.

Suits me fine;  I know what a burger looks like, ditto schnitzel, ditto spaghetti bolognaise, ditto pretty much everything I care to eat.

Although it hasn’t happened yet, if I’m ever told that I can only order a meal through my phone, I’ll get up and walk out.  I hate using my fucking phone at the best of times, and to sit there squinting at a list of dishes in tiny type with microscopic pictures is guaranteed to put me  in a terrible mood — not the ideal customer a restaurant wants, because then I’m going to find fault with almost everything that happens thereafter.

I’ve already griped about concrete walls/floors and loud music, so I’m not going to repeat it all here.

I know all about the cost of labor and the difficulty in finding decent waiters and waitresses nowadays, and I don’t care.  I want the personal touch when I go out to eat, and you can forget that drive-through shit, too — hell, if I ever go to a fast-food restaurant (a highly infrequent event), I park the car and walk inside to place my order.

I was never a fan of “casual dining” to begin with, other than as a family/friends event, or being out of town where I have no option.  But as this move towards impersonal- and remote service seems to be growing, the less likely I’m going to be found eating out.

A pox on all of them, and on this so-called modern life.

Strange Choices

Food & Drink

In a recent survey, Britishlanders were asked to state their favorite sandwiches, and the results were as follows:

For those Murkins unfamiliar with the term, a “ploughman’s” sandwich (cheese, ham, pickled onions or pickles, chutney, and sourdough bread) has nothing to do with ploughmen nor even farming — it was a marketing term developed in the late 1950s, and the promotion of the Ploughman’s lunch was part of a campaign to promote the sale of cheese in pubs.

As for the other choices:  Murkins will also be surprised by prawn sandwiches, but the Brits use the tiny “cocktail” or “baby” prawns, not the normal large things we eat with hot sauce Over Here.

And there has to be a special place in hell for whoever came up with putting tuna and sweetcorn on a sandwich.

Strange Foods

Food & Drink

We’ve all had some fun in the past as we marveled at the various eclectic (ahem) dishes enjoyed by Brits (faggots, toad-in-the-hole, black pudding etc.).

Among these was the “chip butty”:


…which of course is just potato in a sandwich — carbohydrates squared, so to speak.

So if we carry the concept one step further, we get the “crisp sandwich”:

(made all the more confusing because of the chips/fries/crisps nomenclatures that divide us).

Actually, the latter sandwich is not too bad, simply because unlike here in Murka, Brit “crisps” are sold in a dizzying array of flavors — prawn, chicken, lamb, beef and so on — along with the various sub-groups (chicken tikka, steak, hamburger, sausage, lamb & mint sauce, etc.) as well as the staples such as cheese & onion and salt & vinegar.

Sometimes the crisp sandwich is not a stand-alone — you can add your usual sandwich fillings like cheese, salami and so on — with the crisps added for both flavor and crunch*.

Needless to say, this being Britishland, a whole bunch of !SCIENTISTS! decided to explore the latter to see which made the best option.  And here are the results:

Now you know.

*By the way:  the combination of bread, butter, BBQ brisket and jalapeno-flavored “chips” is a pretty tasty dish.

Celebrations And Such

Friends and Family

I will be spending most of today at the range with Doc Russia and some Guests To Be Named Later, so tomorrow’s postings may be few — but will probably contain an extensive range report covering a multitude of guns.

I know you guys hate that kind of stuff, but there ya go.

The background to all this is that Doc is getting married on Saturday and during the week, various family and friends will be converging on this area of North Texas from all over the place, and it is therefore incumbent on Doc and me to entertain them with activities of interest:  shopping for the lady folk, and gun time for the men.  (Unlike most people in government, we have absolutely no problem in identifying women and what pleases them.)  That doesn’t mean that the men will not be shopping (e.g. for shooting gear / guns), and various of the ladies may well want to join us at one of the several shooting events planned for the upcoming week.  We don’t care, as long as everyone has a good time.

And on that topic, Doc’s bachelor party is to take place on Thursday night, so the following day may also reveal a paucity of bloggy material, depending on the number of post-debauchery hobgoblins who will take up residence in my skull in the hours that follow.

It’s going to be a tough week.  Bear with me, please.

Favorite Meals

Food & Drink

What would you choose to eat if you had only one choice of meal, every day for the rest of your life?

This was the thought created by David Beckham revealing that ever since he’s known her, his pointy wife Posh (Victoria) has only ever eaten grilled fish and steamed vegetables.  (Which in turn prompted some other people to share their choices.)

Now for me, this would be something from the seven circles of Hell, because I have so many dishes that I love — having to pick only one would be torture.

I do know that I generally eat only one thing for breakfast every day — grilled boerewors, a boiled egg and a small handful of cheese curds or a bowl of yogurt — and so far, I’ve yet to get sick of it.  But as the only thing?  No.

So let’s stipulate that whatever you choose as your lifetime meal option, it’s only ONE meal of the day:  breakfast, lunch, dinner whatever.

My list of favorite dinner choices are as follows, in no specific order:

Lamb Vindaloo curry with rice and peas

Spaghetti “Bolognese” (meat sauce, to Murkins)

Steak & Mushroom Pie (as made by New Wife) and thick-cut chips

Hungarian Goulash (as made in Vienna/Budapest) on rice

Fish & Chips (cod only, as made in Britishland)

Texas OR Memphis BBQ Brisket and my version of coleslaw*

Chicken Toastie (grilled chicken chunks + only mayo toasted sandwich)
(Okay, I know it looks kinda bland, but it tastes great)

If someone said I had to eat only these seven meals (i.e. one per day) for the rest of my life, I’d probably survive…

And what would your seven daily meals be?

* Kim’s Coleslaw:  angel-hair shredded cabbage, chopped cherry tomatoes, chopped Peppadew, all mixed in with Marzetti’s Cole Slaw Dressing.

 

 

No need to thank me;  it’s all part of the service.