This is terrible!

The Oak Brook, Ill.-based chain had said earlier this year that it was evaluating whether to continue selling the Angus Third Pounders, which were introduced in 2009. The company also said at the time that it was it was cutting Chicken Selects and Fruit & Walnut Salad.

The changes come as McDonald’s looks to keep up with shifting tastes, even as it underscores the affordability of its food. Notably, the Angus burgers were among the chain’s priciest items.

At a time when the restaurant industry is barely growing, McDonald’s has been playing up its Dollar Menu in ads to boost sales and steal customers away from competitors. Even if that hurts profit margins, executives say the strategy is critical to gaining market share and ensuring the long-term health of the company.

But Richard Adams, who consults McDonald’s franchisees, noted that Dollar Menu has also made the Angus burger a less attractive option at around $4 to $5.

“When you can get four or five burgers off the Dollar Menu, nobody’s going to buy the Angus burger,” he said. “The Dollar Menu has become a real problem for these chains.”
But… but… but I was buying that burger!

If you never had an Angus burger from McD’s, it was actually surprisingly good. It isn’t just about the meat. The other ingredients were better, too. It really tasted like something other than a McDonald’s burger.

So why, you might ask, would one Will Truman go to McDonald’s for a burger that expressly doesn’t taste like a McDonald’s burger and cost significantly more than a McDonald’s burger? Well, because I live in Callie Arapaho. There are two fast food burger places. As it happens, the other is Dairy Queen, which serves good burgers also, but (a) it keeps shorter hours when it’s open and (b) it’s only open when the owner feels like it. I mean seriously, sometimes it’s closed for months at a time. It also lacks a drive-through.

We don’t have In-and-Out Burger here, or White Castle, or Happy Burger. To get a good burger, you have to go to a real restaurant or make it yourself.

Despite the initially shocking cost, I thought that there was a good market rationale for having that burger on the menu. Basically, because sometimes you have mixed families. By which I mean, you have people like my wife married to the guy who I was ten years ago. She could get the Angus burger, and I could get the cheapo burger. The range made McDonald’s a good compromise location so that she wouldn’t have to get a lackluster fast food burger, and I wouldn’t have to spend $5 on my burger.

Apparently, that isn’t enough anymore.

I blame assortive mating. Now fast food people marry fast food people, and gourmet fast food people marry gourmet fast food people.

McDonald’s is looking at making some changes, including the possibility of all-day breakfast:

When asked whether there was potential for McDonald’s to serve breakfast all day, Thompson replied: “Yes, we would consider it. We have the focus on our existing menu, but we have looked at breakfast across the day. We have it in some markets around the world.”

He added that the McDonald’s has looked at some “innovative ways” to expand breakfast hours for customers. “I think we’ll be seeing some of those things in the near future,” Thompson.

The company is also experimenting with delivery services in in some countries “in a big way,” as well as in densely populated areas in the U.S. Thompson said that “delivery is a big, big opportunity, particularly in areas where you don’t have drive-throughs.”

I saw this via OTB, which misleadingly suggested that all-day breakfast is going to happen. I didn’t get that impression, myself.

McDonald’s definitely loses business by ending breakfast at 10:30. A lot of people, including myself, aren’t really ready to go out until that 10:30-11 range. So when I am in the mood for a breakfast sandwich of a non-homemade breakfast burrito, I end up elsewhere. Taco John’s and Safeway are the late options here. Elsewhere, it’s Sonic. Or Jack-in-the-Box. JitB actually serves breakfast non-stop. Their offerings aren’t quite as good as McDonald’s, and they’re unhealthier, but the all-day thing is huge. There are no Jacks near where I am. At all. Not in Callie, not in Redstone, not even in Summit.

If Jack can do it, I don’t know why McD can’t.

While I’m on the subject, a couple of McDonald’s stories:

As it happens, I went there for breakfast just last week. You know how sometimes you can just tell that your order is about to be messed up? You don’t have anything solid with which you can confront them about it, but you just know. My tip-off came when the guy asked me to confirm that I wanted egg on my Sausage McMuffin With Egg. It’s right there in the title. Why would he ask that? Then I saw in the order screen “Add Egg.” So I knew that something was wrong. It turned out that he had missed the “Sausage” part. So I got a McMuffin with just egg on it.

Back when Clancy was interviewing for the job in Queenland, I saw something that I had thought had gone the way of [something really tasty that doesn’t exist anymore]. The McBagel. I was huge into McBagel’s when I was younger and never quite forgave the McGriddle for pushing it off the breakfast menu. Did they bring the McBagel back, I wondered, or is it a regional thing? I didn’t know (I think the latter), but I had to get one. Unfortunately, it didn’t end up happening.

It would have happened if they were open until 11.

I thought I would pass along a comment to an old post of mine about dating and obesity:

This post is painfully refreshing. Thank you. It dictates exactly what I believe in my head, but society won’t let me speak from my lips. I live what you’re expressing. I get the same rejection for the same cover-up reasons, only I don’t let them reign. I demonstrate open and truthful expression on all levels, and (no matter how painful) I demand them it return. I am a big woman, a REALLY big woman and I hate to be patronized. Don’t tell me its gourmet chocolate, when it smells like sh**. In my experience, its hard to get people to be truthful and trust that (on my part) there will be no hate connected to it(I can’t speak for the world’s opinion of them, but I don’t care to either). It would be easier if people understood how powerful and expressive body language is. With body language, everything that needs to be communicated is done before he or she utters the first word. I hate to be whispered a lie, while the physical truth is screaming in my face. So, I can appreciate you laying it all out as you have. Brave man.

It is, of course, easy to be brave when I am behind a pseudonym, married, and unlikely to be in the position of having to back up these words with real-life honesty.

If you take Spam, cook it in a frying pan, put it in the freezer, and then eat it straight out of the freezer, the results are interesting.

I am in the habit of buying Spam because I’ve determined it’s less expensive than the bacon bits I really like and serves the same function. It’s fattier, though. But I take it and cut it into little cubes. Then I cook it in batches. Previously, I’d just put it in the fridge. However, with Clancy due for maternity leave and with her extreme aversion to the smell of cooking Spam, I took six cans (half turkey, half low-fat whatever) and did it all at once. Which is how it ended up in the fridge.

What do I use it for? Well, as much as anything, as a snack I take some Wheat Thins, put a little bit of cream cheese on them, and then top it with either the bacon bits or Spam. I’m trying to ween myself off the stuff as it’s quite addictive. The perfect snackfood and I try to keep really good snackfood away from me.

While talking to a fellow Leaguer in Las Vegas, he talked about stopping in Fort Beck – in Deseret where I used to live – and getting completely unacceptable Mexican food. This came as a bit of a surprise to me because I found the Mexican food there to be very acceptable. As he described it, I was pretty sure that he stopped at Taco John’s. Taco John’s is big on putting tater-tots in everything. Then again, so are other places within Idaho and the states around Idaho, so it’s hard to say for sure.

Anyhow, Gustavo Arellano has an article about Mexican food in the US and how American it is:

The most popular restaurant in town that day was Taco John’s. I didn’t know it then, but Taco John’s is the third-largest taco chain in the United States, with nearly 500 locations. But what lured me that morning was a drive-through line snaking out from the faux-Spanish revival building (whitewashed adobe and all) and into the street. Once I inched my rental car next to the menu, I was offered an even more outrageous simulacrum of the American Southwest: tater tots, that most Midwestern of snacks, renamed “Potato Olés” and stuffed into a breakfast burrito, nacho cheese sauce slowly oozing out from the bottom of the flour tortilla.

There is nothing remotely Mexican about Potato Olés—not even the quasi-Spanish name, which has a distinctly Castilian accent. The burrito was more insulting to me and my heritage than casting Charlton Heston as the swarthy Mexican hero in Touch of Evil. But it was intriguing enough to take back to my hotel room for a taste. There, as I experienced all of the concoction’s gooey, filling glory while chilly rain fell outside, it struck me: Mexican food has become a better culinary metaphor for America than the melting pot.

Back home, my friends did not believe that a tater tot burrito could exist. When I showed them proof online, out came jeremiads about inauthenticity, about how I was a traitor for patronizing a Mexican chain that got its start in Wyoming, about how the avaricious gabachos had once again usurped our holy cuisine and corrupted it to fit their crude palates.

In defending that tortilla-swaddled abomination, I unknowingly joined a long, proud lineage of food heretics and lawbreakers who have been developing, adapting, and popularizing Mexican food in El Norte since before the Civil War. Tortillas and tamales have long left behind the moorings of immigrant culture and fully infiltrated every level of the American food pyramid, from state dinners at the White House to your local 7-Eleven. Decades’ worth of attempted restrictions by governments, academics, and other self-appointed custodians of purity have only made the strain stronger and more resilient. The result is a market-driven mongrel cuisine every bit as delicious and all-American as the German classics we appropriated from Frankfurt and Hamburg.

I’m all about equal opportunity. I love actual Mexican food. I love Tex-Mex. I love the bastardizations of Taco Bell and Taco John’s. We have a Taco John’s here in Callie, but not a Taco Bell. TJ’s is more expensive, but has better ingredients. If you don’t mind the tater tots. Which are actually not bad tater tots, especially if they’re right out of the pan. If you can deal with the incongruity of a tater tot infused burrito.

Clancy and I both prefer our meat well done, though she is more of a stickler for it than I am. We went out over the weekend to a diner across the street from the hospital. They are inclined to undercook the meat, so we both make a special point of requesting “well done” and about half of the time they do it. Saturday was one of the other half. Clancy waited a bit to ask them to cook it further, but the waitress was MIA and she was hungry enough that she ate it anyway.

When the waitress gave us the bill, she commented on it, politely requesting that she say something to the cook for future reference. Now, whenever we say something, we don’t actually expect them to say something to the cook. When I went to the front to pay the bill, the waitress said that the cook felt bad about it. Before she took the credit card, though, she asked if we wanted another burger for each of us. Suspicious soul that I am, combined with the fact that she hadn’t taken the credit card, I thought I was being asked to buy two more burgers because the first two weren’t done right. I was a little irritated.

But no, they were free. Apparently the cook actually felt that bad about it. So we got free burgers for lunch the next day.

I am generally of the type to not bother telling anybody that they got something wrong. Like I said, I don’t think they actually tell the cook about it. Or feel bad about it. I expect them to be irritated by the unctuous customers who want things “just so”, don’t order tip-enhancing drinks, and probably aren’t going to tip very well for a reason they view as being frivolous. Clancy is more the type to speak up. And it scored us two free burgers. Not bad.

I ate my burger straight out of the fridge the next day. Clancy thinks that’s bizarre. Is she right?

I thought I posted on this when we did it last year, but once a year this group of alumni from an outside school rent our back yard so that they can have a party for the annual football game. People come in from all over. they serve tacos and pot-luck. I am invited to participate, but these are people who only see each other once every now and again and I don’t know any of them. Players and cheerleaders from the other school also partake (hence the post’s title).

Last year they were very good about cleaning everything up. This year, they were the same. They did all that could be expected. However, inevitably food gets spilled. So in the week or so since the game, every time we let the dog out, Lisby sprints towards the places where they congregate and eats whatever has been left behind.

It is, obviously, not good for her at all. And after a couple of days, she felt the effects. You could hear her tummy gurgling. You could see a disconcerted look on her face. Clancy and I kept wondering if maybe she learned her lesson, but she would go out there and keep eating whatever she could.

We kind of roll our eyes. Except that for several days after Halloween, I lived off chocolate. We had a lot of leftovers. My system is not used to such copious amounts of chocolate. And so, I got sick. Did this mean that I stopped eating chocolate?

Well, let’s just say: like dog, like owner.

One of the household things I don’t do very much is cook. Part of it is because my repertoire is limited and mostly involves foods that Clancy does not like. Not that she is a finicky eater, just that there is a culinary mismatch. She likes all of these spices and herbs that I often can’t even taste. I like plain things and don’t really no how to do complicated things. She’s going to teach me when she has time, but she doesn’t have the time.

Did you know Spam goes bad? I thought it was like Velveeta. I had a velveeta block for a year and a half and ne’er a problem with it. Spam doesn’t even last a month even when refrigerated. The odd thing about Spam is that you have to taste several bites before you realize that it has gone bad.

I drink a lot of soft drinks and switch around from one to the next. Soft drinks in bottles go flat (even when unopened) way before cans do. Another thing I have learned. Now I have two dozen bottles of Mountain Dew that doesn’t taste particular good.

I’ve re-acquainted myself with the joys of fake crab. It’s prepared and thoroughly processed food made up to taste like crab, but my diminished tastebuds can’t really taste the difference. Since it’s already prepared, I can eat it straight out of the bag out of the fridge. It makes a great little snack.

I’ve also taken to eating large-curd cottage cheese. I’m trying to cut back on my cream cheese intake and I can go further with the cottage than the cream. Clancy has been eating a lot of cottage cheese mixed with yogurt over the past year, but she gets the fat free stuff which barely has any curd at all. It feels like unnecessary duplication to have both, but I’m looking at it like diet coke (which she drinks) compared to regular coke (which I do). Different product, in its own way.

They’ve stopped carrying my favorite processed roast beef at the local Safeway. I’ve grown spoiled on the stuff. The alternatives just taste too salty.

Things have been really hectic lately, which is why I haven’t been as regularly writing and commenting. I’m hoping that it will all be smoothed out by the end of the week.

Speaking of smooth, am I the only one who thinks those Keith Stone commercials are a hoot?

Domino’s Pizza is bragging on their new website where you can track your pizza order. They also have a little feedback/comment section.

It seems like it’s popular among companies to ask for feedback. A lot of places will even offer a reward (or more common, a chance at a reward) for feedback.

I actually like Domino’s new method. Instead of ten questions that you don’t know how to answer because you don’t know how they will be received (some places will penalize for anything lower than a “perfect” score, so if you think you think you are doing them a favor by giving a 9/10, you are actually giving them a demerit. Anyhow, Domino’s appears to be a more informal process. Simply leave a note (“too much garlic”) and that’s that. The messages get posted, and pride does the rest.

I don’t expect that I will be ordering any pizza from Dominos in the near future, but I have to give them credit for the simplicity of the concept.

I thought I had figured it out perfectly. When Mom asked what I would like for dinner, I would say “beef enchiladas.” I like her beef enchiladas, but not as much as I like her chicken enchiladas. The problem is that when I ask for the chicken enchiladas, I can’t then get the King Ranch Casserole. They both have torn chicken, you see. But the beef enchiladas have beef. So no problem! Until we get to what’s for dinner the next night.

Mom: What would you like for dinner tomorrow night?

Trumwill: How about King Ranch Casserole?

Mom: Can’t.

Trumwill: Why not?

Mom: Can’t have Mexican two nights in a row.

Trumwill: King Ranch Casserole isn’t Mexican. King and Ranch are English words. Casserole is… I don’t now, English or French, but not Mexican.

Mom: Corn tortillas.

Trumwill: Okay, fine. What about lasagne?

Mom: Ground beef. You had that tonight.

Trumwill: Well yes, but… we’re going from Mexican to Italian.

Mom: Ground beef. What about meat loaf?

Trumwill: I do like your meat loaf, but I’m not sure I want to use it for one of my few meals while I’m here. What if we went to Oysterland?

Mom: Can’t.

Trumwill: Why not? Oysters aren’t ground beef. No corn tortillas.

Mom: We always get one dish of regular and one of picante, right?

Trumwill: Yes?

Mom: That’s Mexican two nights in a row. Picante is definitely a Mexican word.

Trumwill: What if we just got the regular? I can live without the picante.

Mom: Would you want the regular or would you want the picante?

Trumwill: Well I like both, but…

Mom: I can’t take you to Oysterland and not let you order what you would want to order.

Trumwill: Then we’ll get the usual!

Mom: Can’t. Mexican two nights in a row. Can’t do that.

Trumwill: So it’s meat loaf?

Mom: Unless you can give me something you want that you haven’t just already eaten.

Trumwill: What would you do if I listened to a Meat Loaf record?

Mom: Have you?

Trumwill: No, but I will.

Mom: I think you can listen to and then eat meat loaf.

Trumwill: But I can’t eat enchiladas and then oysters.

Mom: Can’t. Mexican.

Trumwill: Damn.

{The sad thing is, if I’d just gotten the chicken enchiladas I wanted, I would have been able to get the oysters or the lasagne.}