Eat your Veggies

A favorite childhood game of ours was Restaurant. Interestingly enough, we never had a name for our Restaurant, it was just playing Restaurant. When we were very little the game was played indoors, using different books as the meals being served. The entire upstairs of our house was turned into the dinning room, and we were waiters bringing various patrons their dinner of choice. I don't really remember having a kitchen in our restaurant and no one seemed to be the cook. Perhaps my brother Daniel was banished to the kitchen, but I really don't remember. I guess waitstaff life looked very glamorous to us. Ignorance really is bliss. I remember when McDonald's handed out play food as part of the happy meal. We then played McDonald's serving up our plastic fries, burgers, and McNuggets. Apart from that we never really had play food. We had real food. As we got a little older, I was maybe 8 or 9, Restaurant took on a whole new life. One of our childhood chores was cutting green beans. My mother canned a lot of green beans. She canned pretty much any vegetable that could go in a can. And fruit too. But they went in jars, not cans. Why do you call it canning when stuff is in jars? I digress. Green bean harvest was a big endeavour. First there was the picking of said beans, a feat unto itself. But the fun part, really, was cutting the beans. Each of us would get a little station set up, sometimes in front of the TV with the piano bench as your table, then you got one of the brown cutting boards, or the one shaped like a cat if you were lucky. With a large tub of beans on one side and two empty ice cream pails on the other you started off to work. Oh yeah, and we each had a knife. Yep, my knife wielding skills were honed at an early age. So you cut the ends off the beans, they went into one bucket, then cut the beans into about 1 inch pieces, and they went into the other bucket. And this continued for maybe 2 days. Such childhood fun. The point of this meandering side track; we were very handy with the knife at an early age. So back to Restaurant. We had a playhouse outside by the barn, filled with all kinds of toy dishes and such. We would get a pail or two of water from the well, (yes the well) maybe fill another with dirt or sand. Then pull up a bunch of grass, get some twigs and leaves from the bushes by our house and the take the wheelbarrow down to the garden to collect whatever vegetables my mother wasn't going to use. They had either gotten too big and tough, or were somewhat rotten. I remember carting back huge turnips, zucchinis, cabbages, beets, pumpkins and whatever green beans were left after the plants had been uprooted. We took our stash back to the playhouse and began carving up said veggies as if they were roast turkeys or huge sides of beef. I can remember mixing them with dirt and twigs and then plating our masterpieces to be served to our customers eagerly awaiting the delicacies our young chef minds had created. Of course in reality they looked like mud pies at best, but with a healthy imagination even the strangest plate of vegetables can become a feast fit for a king.

Yesterday I was running around midtown doing some errands and got hungry. I decided that I would go to Quiznos for lunch. They have really good salads there, particularly this one with warm steak and some kind of strong cheese, blue perhaps. They also have great sandwiches, but with my new diet, breads are really a treat, not an everyday item. So I had my mind set on my nice steak salad and I'd get some tomato basil soup, perfect lunch for a winter afternoon, and fit nicely within my diet. Well, they have since sent said steak salad to salad heaven. (say that 5 times fast) In fact the only salads on their "new" (code for crappy) menu all featured chicken or chili. I decided on the Chicken Taco Salad, since I can't have Ceasar dressing, the Chili Taco Salad did not look too appealing to me, and I wasn't sure if the Asian Chicken Salad had toasted almonds, a fate worse than death to me. What I got was a small bowl filled with cold chicken (one of my favorite parts of the Quiznos salad WAS the hot meat) shredded yellow cheddar cheese, a smear of some green pasty glob (containing very little if any avocado) a generous teaspoon, if that, of salsa and the devil himself, iceberg lettuce! I interject here that another favorite part of my Quiznos salad experiences in the past have been that the salad portion was actually mixed greens, a little romaine lettuce along with other lettuces, occasionally the purpley looking one. Sometimes if lucky you could find a piece of arugula. It would appear that part of their "new" salad menu now includes the one vegetable that should be stripped of its vegetable privileges altogether. Iceberg lettuce has absolutely no nutritional value whatsoever. It contains no fiber, no vitamins, nothing. It is basically water in crunchy form. I might as well have been served a bowl of chicken, salsa, cheese, green smear, and water. Now in a fast food place I suppose I can somewhat understand that we must use said "lettuce" as its beyond cheap. I have however been to many a restaurant where the cheapest item on the menu was $10 and ordered a house salad only to be served a plate of iceberg "lettuce," a wedge of tomato, and a slice of cucumber. I'm sorry but in what house does that constitute a salad. Even on our farm in the middle of nowhere we new better than to put Iceberg lettuce in a salad. Its only place is in the taco! I have actually embarrassed friends of mine while out for dinner, asking the waiter what kind of lettuce the salad comes on. If they reply it's Iceberg I gasp in disgust and kindly inform said waiter that it's not a vegetable at all and then order something else. Seriously, I'm all about eating healthy, but America we are being fooled!!! Revolt I tell you. Flee from it. Nothing good can come from the Iceberg. Did the Titanic teach us nothing!!!

Dear Diary, I cut my thumb the other day while slicing carrots. Perhaps I need that cat shaped cutting board for luck!