It’s never fun being on a delayed flight, and it’s no fun waiting for someone on such a flight either.
So on a recent Friday night, my son and I were both tired and hungry when his flight finally made it to Chicago’s O’Hare Airport where I had been waiting to pick him up.
We’d planned to cook dinner once we got to our house, but were both hungry by the time he landed, so we went searching for food near O’Hare and found Sultan Kebab & Shawerma. It was a great find.
As we ordered (at almost 9 p.m.), the man behind the counter offered us free lentil soup he’d made. He wanted our reaction to it. It was delicious.
Rising prices are discouraging people from eating out or from ordering-in from restaurants, according to a new study by bid-on-equipment.com, which sells a variety of used equipment, including restaurant equipment.
The study surveyed 1,008 Americans early this year. It found 50% saying they are eating out less because of inflation.
The impact of the Pandemic was evident in survey responses, 40% of those answering said at least one of their favorite restaurants had closed permanently during the Pandemic.
Local restaurants still are preferred by more people than are chains. When searching for a place to eat, people turn to Google, word-of-mouth, Yelp and other social media, the survey found. (For more survey responses, see the graphic here).
Brown lettuce in my McDonald’s Caesar Salad, shame on you McD’s.
I’ve been writing about the return of salads to McDonald’smenu in 2022. My first try was its new Southwest salad, a pale reminder of the Southwest salad it once had. Today, I review its other new salad, a Caesar salad.
The packaging is the same as for the Southwest salad and has a use by date on the top, showing these are made somewhere offsite from McDonald’s stores. So they’ve been sitting somewhere waiting to be served. The one I bought had been sitting long enough that lettuce in it was brown, not very appetizing.
Unseal it and you see a tray with ingredients that include chicken, bacon and two compartments of cheese. That has to mean a lot of salt, both in the bacon and the cheese. The bacon bites tasted like real bacon, not some substitute. There are also croutons, likely also high in salt.
Lists of healthy, or at least the least unhealthy, offerings at fast-food restaurants seem to pop up every year. That’s because those places are ubiquitous. If you’re out and about, it’s hard to avoid them. Plus, if you’re on a restricted diet like I am, every once and a whole you want to feel normal again by eating where the masses eat.
It’s fun to see the classic White Castle slider on this list. “You don’t have to feel bad about enjoying a couple Original Sliders from White Castle — it scores better on the “healthy” scale than even the chicken or fish sliders. But here’s a surprise: if you’re looking for a vegetarian option, go with the Veggie Slider over the Impossible Slider to consume less overall calories and fat,” the article states. It doesn’t;t say anything about having six sliders at a meal as I sometimes do.
I’ve been blogging for several days about fascinating new research from Influence Central about how the COVID-19 Pandemic has impacted how people eat and cook. Today I’m focusing on what it’s meant for cooking time and take-out behavior.
While people are being forced to eat more at home, they don’t seem to be turning into health-conscious cooks who spend hours each day in their kitchens, the study finds. For example:
46% are willing to spend 15 to 30 minutes cooking
44% will spend 30-60 minutes.
Only 23% are willing to devote more time to dinner prep
73% are devoting about the same as prior to stay-at-home orders
Sadly, what this means is many are eating unhealthy meals.
My mix and match fish dinner cooking away, walleye in the white pan, tilapia in the black with peppers and onions in the third.
“Frozen meals from pizzas to more substantial heat and serve entrees, prepared meals ready to cook from the supermarket, and canned goods such as soups and chili become go-to items,” says Stacy DeBroff, CEO and founder, Influence Central.
“It’s clear that even with more time at home, some people still don’t necessarily want to spend all day in the kitchen,” she says.
All of those choices are normally very high in salt and can be high in fat and sugar as well.
When it comes to take-out:
• 69% of consumers have ordered take-out or delivery food from restaurants during the pandemic.
• 71% order from restaurants they ate in prior to the crisis.
• 87% order take-out from a specific local restaurant out of a desire to support the restaurant financially.
• When it comes to getting food delivered, consumers’ top choice is direct from the restaurant itself (60%). Favorite delivery services: Door Dash, followed by GrubHub and Uber Eats.
“More than half said they have not been concerned to leave the house to pick up food or collect it from a delivery driver,” DeBroff reports.
Influence Central found that the top ordering choices are:
1. Pizza (79%)
2. Fast Food (52%)
3. American and Pub Food (ex. Burgers and wings) (45%)
4. Mexican (39%)
5. Asian (35%)
6. Italian other than Pizza (23%)
Early this year my wife and I took a long-talked-about dream vacation to Hawaii, spending a week in Honolulu and another week on the island of Kauai. It seems a million years ago now with a pandemic sweeping the globe.
But I hope that reading about wonderful places to eat in Hawaii will brighten some people’s days and turn their thoughts to happier times.
I’ve already written that there’s a lot of junk food in Hawaii, especially in the heavy tourist areas like Honolulu. But there also are some wonderful restaurants featuring fresh seafood.
My Hula Grill dinner.
One we enjoyed was the Hula Grill Waikiki. It’s in a hotel, but much better than the average hotel restaurant. It offers a wide range of seafood option, including nightly specials, and fish you don’t see on the mainland like opah and monchong.
And both mahi mahi and ahi are on the menu, fresher there than you’ll taste on the mainland as well. Pictured here is my dinner, which as I recall was a nightly special, I think of ahi.
A lot of people have been posting on social media about helping their local restaurants by ordering take-out and delivery meals. Some of the delivery services are even offering lower or no fees for a few weeks to encourage it.
Now, a large group of national restaurants wants to take the idea across the country with what they’re calling The Great American Takeout on Tuesday, March 24. And yes, of course, there’s a hashtag #thegreatamericantakeout
Many. many people are out of work right now and likely can’t afford such luxuries, but if you can afford it, ordering from your favorite restaurant with a takeout meal Tuesday is a great way to show support.
Life can have unexpected consequences sometimes. Since the New Year began, I’ve been on a cleaning and organizing binge, likely because of Japanese-super-organizer Marie Kondo and her new Netflix series. My wife and I even organized our kitchen junk drawer, usually a no-mans-land of forgotten items.
And in that drawer I found I had an old Corner Bakery gift card. Corner Bakery was an early entrant in the fast casual category of restaurants — places that tried to be a cut above hamburger joints and positioned themselves as healthier with fresher ingredients than tradition fast food.
But as always with such claims, the devil is in the details. Or should I say the salt is the devil in the menu? The reason I never finished using my Corner Bakery gift card was because of the high salt content of most Corner Bakery offerings. So I’ve had this card for years with about $7 left on it to spend.
Are you full yet? My wife tends to ask me that every time we eat and I usually reply, no, I’m never really full.
Is that really possible or am I just focusing feeling stuffed with being full? As it turns out, apparently you can eat some foods that just leave you feeling hungry. I was intrigued by that idea when I saw this headline 12 Foods That Leave You Hungry on WebMD, so I clicked through to view the list.
my egg white omelet apparently isn;t filling me up.
Of the foods listed, I eat low-fate yogurt and egg whites regularly on advice from various nutritionists I’ve seen since my first angioplasty back in 2012. And doughnuts, french fries and diet soda are on my regular cheat list as well, so that’s five out of the 12. No wonder I never feel full. Check the list to see how many of your favorites are on it. Two I have cut out since 2012 are white bread and white rice.
I’m always wary of claims that various foods can cure anything or even improve health. The science of how what we eats impacts us is still too primitive and too general for my taste. Case-in-point is this story I read recently about black pepper.
Find a spice store that will create salt-free blends for you
For someone trying to cut salt from their diets, pepper becomes a go-to flavoring It’s usually available when eating out, for one, and it’s tasty without being spicy hot which I tend to shy away from. So I’m using more pepper in my cooking.
But this Time article says black pepper could aid digestion and have other health benefits as well. It also can counter-act some carcinogens in charred beef (barbecue fans take note).
I hope all that is true, but for now, I’ll just use black pepper because I like the taste. If you have a local spice shop, ask for a salt-free mixture of various peppers as I’ve done to get some variety of flavor.
The No Salt, No Fat, No Sugar Journal 