Jane Galt is mischievous:

Not thirty minutes later, in the Japanese restaurant, I confirmed this opinion by unblushingly informing the waiter that I am allergic to seaweed, and asking them to make the rolls without it. Now, in fact, I am not allergic to seaweed; I just hate the taste of it. But “allergic” produces more willingness to help me out by making the rolls without seaweed than “I hate one of the major components of your national cuisine, please cater to my philistine tastes”. I have used this line with great success in many other restaurants.

I hate hate hate tomatoes, but I try not to special order things even in fast food restaurants because having worked in one I know that it messes their juju. Besides, it’s easier for me to take my own tomato off. But removing sliced and diced tomatoes is a lot more difficult. So when I’m eating somewhere with sliced and diced tomatoes but an unmotivated staff (Taco Bell comes to mind) I have been known to pull the “allergic” card. I think it makes them slightly more attentive and also makes it so that I don’t have to say “no tomatoes” on each thing I’m ordering or if I forget they won’t.

The misspelling in the title is an ode to my younger self who couldn’t understand how allergic could be spelled any other way.

I took a trip to the dentist last week for another unsubsidized cleaning. Unfortunately my mouth is not doing as well as we would like it to be, so she had to put in some anti-bachterial powder in between my teeth and gums. I managed to surpress my smile when she told me that it meant that I couldn’t floss for a couple weeks. She also told me to avoid certain foods, namely crackers and chips.
I had absolutely no idea how much I eat in the way of crackers and chips until the past few days:

• I bought three 10-packs (with six a piece inside) of those sandwich cracker snacks just the other day. Now they sit in my desk and taunt me.
• I ordered soup that I couldn’t eat crackers with.
• I declined to order salad cause I would have wanted crackers with them.
• No Mexican restaurants cause they come with chips and salsa.
• No chips from the vending machine.
• I have to get cookies instead of chips at Subway with the combo meal (okay, so that’s not such a sacrifice…)
• Not mentioned by the dentist but implied was hard candy. I’m a sucker for hard candy that gets rooted deep into your teeth. Hence my dental problems.

I’d almost rather them tell me to give up refined sugar.

When I was twelve or so we took a trip to Great Britain, wherein we ate at some of Britain’s finest restaurants. And everywhere we went that offered it, I ordered a hamburger. I probably get it from my father, who knows the Landlover Special at just about every seafood joint in Mayne.

I really wish I could go back to Britain and do it right, restaurant-wise. I wish that I’d understood that you don’t tailor a restaurants menu to what you want, you try to find the best thing that the menu has to offer at the place that you’re eating. You can get a better hamburger at the average hamburger joint than you can the most upscale restaurant in town that prefers to serve duck… and there aren’t many places you can get good duck.

During my conversation the other day with Pat, I mentioned that El Taco Patio, a very prevalent Mexican food chain in the area, apparently does not exist in 47 of the 50 states. In talking about the chain Pat commented that Californians were in her experience more into burritos so a place called El Taco Patio (that makes a pretty mediocre burrito) may not do as well there. A lot of the state’s California immigrants that go there order burritos and come out disappointed that a place with “taco” n the name serves substandard burritos.

It reminded me a bit of my former roommate Hubert. There was a little Mexican restaurant that we absolutely loved because of their Macho Burrito. The thing was absolutely huge and only $4. Just about everything else on the menu was smaller and more expensive. Hubert, who was a bit of a tagalong because he (correctly) thought that my group hadn’t really accepted him as one of us, insisted on coming with us to the burrito dive… and order something else. We tried to explain to him that burritos were the only reason to go to this place, but he said he didn’t like burritos and after a few times started insisting that we go somewhere else and insinuated that we lacked his taste in food. When he realized that we were happier going to the burrito dive without him than we were somewhere else with him, he started coming along and eventually found something else on the menu he liked, even if it was overpriced.

The conversation with Pat actually started on Asian food and her brother’s tendency to order Chinese food at any restaurant that served Asian food, even if it was a Thai or Japanese restaurant. And whenever he was eating at a Thai or Japanese restaurant, he would complain that the Chinese food was subpar.

There is a restaurant in northern Santomas that bills itself as “The best in Salvadoran and Mexican cuisine.”

I can guarantee you what happened. They opened what they thought was going to be a restaurant serving Salvadoran food and after being asked for the umpteenth time why Enchiladas weren’t on the menu, they caved to market demand. The Onion had a great article on how an American family went into a Spanish restaurant and were upset that their favorite Mexican offerings weren’t on the menu.

Apparently, It is not customary in Mexico to offer free chips and salsa before the meal. However, if you go to certain tourist towns down there a lot of them will offer it because they got tired of angry American customers feeling that they were being slighted. As a fan of chips and salsa, that’s one kind of American cultural imperalism that I can get behind.

My family became close to another family, The Charleses, through church. We go vacation together annually and they’re almost like family. The second-youngest Charles daughter was getting married and the Charleses were stunned to discover that our pastor, Father Shelby, refused to marry them in the church during lent. “But we’re Episcopalians! We don’t let things like that get in between us and what we want and we want a spring wedding!”

It eventually became such a big deal that it contributed to Father Shelby’s ouster a couple years later. The new pastor wisely did not follow Shelby’s policy.

I’d always thought of Lent as primarily a Catholic thing, I’m not sure why. All I really knew about it growing up was that it began right after the Pancake Supper and before the Easter Eggs. Looking back I remember fish on Friday, but I didn’t know that there was a connection except that it was something that the Pope told us to do, even though we were dissidents from the Pope’s command. It’s all kind of a haze.

Anyhow, Estacado has a relatively high proportion of Catholics due to its significant immigration population and those fast food positions that are not taken up by high school (and some college) students are generally filled with Latinos. Often Catholic Latinos.

My coworker Pat has resorted to planning where she eats on Fridays based on Lent-based customer traffic. Long John Silvers, for instance, is a very poor place to eat lunch on a Friday in Estacado for Lent. Taco Bell has special Lent meat-free offerings that I’d never seen before arriving here, though maybe I missed it, as does this other regional chain. Pat even has to avoid those places or find meatless entres because they will often put the order through without meat either because they assume she wants it that way or she ought to want it that way. She has apparently resorted to going to burger places cause, obnoxious in-your-face vegetarians aside, it’s a safe bet that you don’t order a Big Mac without the actual meat so it’s impossible for anyone to assume that’s what you ordered.

It reminds me of the whole debate regarding pharmacists that object to dispensing birth control pills and the like. One proposed solution was to allow individual pharmacists to decline to fill the prescription but require that each pharmacy be required to have at least one pharmacist under their employ that will fill it out. Maybe local restaurants can do the same, “Hey Mike, this guy wants to order meat, can you take over the register for a minute?”

Something that I don’t understand:

Sometimes I like to make myself half a sandwich. I take a single slice of bred, put some ham and cheese in there (along with some BBQ sauce or spicy mustard), roll the bread, and eat it. But one is rarely enough. I usually want two.

But if I make myself a traditional sandwich with two slices of ham and cheese in between two slices of bread… I get tired of eating halfway through and don’t want any more.

I read some time ago that a study was done. Well, I have read frequently about many studies, but this study involves foods percieved to be healthy and how Americans think food is better if it is bad for us. I can’t remember the specifics, but I think it involved calling non-low-fat hamburgers low-fat and vice-versa.

I must confess, I think that I am in that category. Decadence is delicious!

The other day I got some canned “organic chili” cause it sounded like it would be less obnoxious to my body than the regular canned stuff. It tasted really good! They put some garlic and onion in there and it had a somewhat unique taste. What I didn’t realize in addition to being “organic” it also didn’t have any meat.

It was too late, as I had already decided that I liked it, but I am sure that if I’d known it had soy and tofu I would have hated it.

Me, Yesterday: I have got to cut down on my junkfood intake. I’m spending too much money on too much crappy food. So resolved, since I have run out of cash I’m going to go to work without any cash tomorrow. That’ll force me to behave.

Me, This morning: Clancy, do you have any cash I can borrow?