Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Oh, forks

I'm finishing up some leftover fried seafood and pondering something. By and large, and there are exceptions to this rule, fried food is eaten with your hands, while the rest of the food groups are deemed utensil-worthy. Why? Think about it - you wouldn't just pick up a marinated, grilled chicken breast with your hands and chow down, right? (I'm assuming here.) But batter and deep-fry that thing and you can eat it with your hands out of a bucket. Not to mention you can get chicken in "finger" or "nugget" form.

Likewise, I'd like to think that you'd pick up a fork when dealing with a grilled fillet of salmon, but in fried stick form, fish is a perfectly acceptable finger food. Baked potato = fork; French fries or chips = dig in with dos manos. Does the deep-fried-ness somehow constitute a wrapper or carrying case of some kind?

You know what I'm surprised we don't see more of? Deep fried beef. Yes, there's chicken fried steak (which warrants a fork, but only, I presume, because there's gravy involved), but that's about it as far as I know. Where are the French fry-style beef strips? Beef nuggets? I guess "cow fingers" doesn't have quite the same ring to it as "chicken fingers," does it? Still, we're a nation that deep-fries Twinkies, for God's sake. How are we lagging so far behind in the fried beef category?

Unrelatedly, how much of a difference is there between "air-tight" and "water-tight"?
- v -

Wednesday, March 25, 2009

I don't see no lettuce!

Man.

I really didn't think it was possible to make a taco salad less healthy than it inherently is, but our work cafeteria has found a way. Generally speaking, the work cafeteria taco salad is more like nachos on steroids - they don't use the little edible taco shell bowls; they use tortilla chips and pile on beef (or chicken, for the health nuts), lettuce, cheese, olives, peppers, onions, salsa, sometimes refried beans, and a huge dollop of sour cream. And I'm talking serious sour cream - they use an ice cream scoop to dish it out.

Today they ran out of tortilla chips, so instead they used (drumroll, please) Doritos. Seriously, there's an entire snack-size bag of Doritos in my "salad" right now. They mingle pretty nicely with the ice cream scoop-size mounds of sour cream and ground beef. I think I'll go have a heart attack now. Good thing I did some yoga this morning. Yeah, I'm sure 20 minutes of bending and stretching was more than enough to offset a Dorito-and-beef-based monstrosity of this magnitude.

Oh, and if you didn't get the title "I don't see no lettuce!" then feast your eyes and ears upon this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zu3Ls4guf-s

Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Happy (belated) snow day

This little guy awaited me when I walked into work yesterday:



Someone took the time during the crap weather to make a little snow dude on top of a trash can beside the VeeP building. That's a little soda bottle cap for a hat he's got there and berries from a nearby tree for eyes. That warmed my heart a bit, even if the weather sucked and I was sick enough that I didn't even make it through the whole work day before I had to go home and crash on my futon. Still, the little snow dude made it all worthwhile. It's the little things.
Incidentally - on a cold, crap day, Trader Joes "Organic" Ruby Red Chai tea is magically delicious, even though it involves my new pet peeve word - "organic". Dunno why, but that word just gets on my nerves lately. Like it so effin matters that your teabag is organic.
- v -