rant: fine dining

[JL21]

My mom's kid-friendly name for that dish was "SOS", but we all knew what it meant.

[lukethedrifter]

I always ate what my mom cooked.

buddig chipped beef on toast, it's like they left the plastic wrapper on.

Ham hocks and beans with ketchup - couldn't do it. My Mom finally gave up making me eat it and I got peanut butter those nights.

So you were the cutting edge of today's [expletive] whiney, nugget eating kids. Congrats on leading the way.

[jim]

I was definitely on the leading edge of here is your food on a tray so you can sit in front of the TV while you eat generation. So I lead the way for all of the hipsters with their nose stuck in their phone.

Actually we always ate together as a family, the tray thing was for breakfast and lunch and after school snacks. Why did those 70's trays become of so popular and why did they all but disappear? I should buy some.

[Jocephus]

we had TMNT tv trays

[Fat_Bulldog]

We have a set of wooden tv trays and we use them everyday.

[jim]

I want the cheap plastic ones with that 70's olive green as the main color.

BTW - Friday night there is a food segment on the news up here in Chicago. Steve Balinski's Hungry Hound or something like that. If you are a normal person you just want to meet the guy to punch him. He seems like a nice guy, but the dweeb level is just too high to tolerate. Anyway - and I'm making this up - he featured a restaurant Friday and highlighted the ... drum roll please ... toast! They mill their own grain for flour or some god damned thing and I guess they make good toast. Saw him putting jelly on it - probably not Smuckers.

Speaking of toast - I'm sitting here eating a poptart and I'm wondering how many of you toast your poptart? I'll bet of all the poptarts I have eaten in my life less that .001% have been toasted.

[Jocephus]

i usually dont toast 'em

[33anda3rd]

He seems like a nice guy, but the dweeb level is just too high to tolerate.

Nailed it. He's a poon. Nice guy. But still a poon.

[Diddy]

If I'm at home I toast them, but it's pretty rare that I eat them at home. Usually grab them headed out the door because that's all I have time for.

[tlombard]

The company that runs our cafeteria at work claims to have 'chefs' and an 'executive chef' but either they are full of it or the definition of 'chef' is really low. And I should mention up front that these aren't really big deals but they probably bother the heck out of me because my mom went to culinary school and spent a few years as an executive chef at the only country club in the world to have given an Olympic Gold Medal for golf (until Brazil next year) so I compare these 'chefs' to the standards my mom and the people that worked for her have and find it almost insulting. Either that or I'm crazy. Probably crazy.

The food isn't great but at least passable most of the time but they do things that drive me insane like today. They have a 'Chinese buffet' option. Uh, no. You have a choice of either egg roll or crab rangoon and then either rice or noodles and then one of two dishes. You don't get to go back for more. Clearly they don't understand what the word buffet means!!!

They will label one dish as 'pasta con broccoli with broccoli' as if they don't realize that the 'con broccoli' part of the name is enough for us to figure out it is freaking pasta with broccoli!!!

They'll serve 'pasta bolognese with meat' which is stupid because the very definition of bolognese means that there is meat in it!!!

Then there is the guy who we had to suffer through for awhile who put gravy on literally everything. If you couldn't put canned gravy on it (not that anybody ever should) then he didn't cook it.

If you want a burger then you had probably better get it right at 11 when they start serving lunch because it was thrown on the grill well before 10 and has been sitting in a pan of water/juice/whatever since then.

Breakfast is legit though. I do like their breakfast. Mainly because you can get omelets and such made to order so it hasn't been sitting forever. Of course they do have one maddening practice. I have literally seen the guy deep frying turkey sausage links before because he was running low and it is quicker than cooking them on the flat top. I can guarantee you that almost anybody who is ordering turkey sausage would be appalled to know it was deep fried.

And my mom is no longer the executive chef. The physical demands were getting to be a bit much for her (12 hours a day, 6 days a week and walking 14 miles per shift once she started using technology to track her movement) so she quit and got a job as a simple line cook at another country club where she works set hours and only five days a week for the guy who hired and mentored her back at the last place.