Recently in Food Category

Sorry for the lack of posts for the past few weeks, but life has been a wild ride since Rudy died. We sold our house, packed our house, and moved into a small one-bedroom apartment 30 miles away. Meanwhile, the semester was coming to an end (this is finals week). In any case, we're settled into the 703 square-feet upstairs unit that we'll call home for the next six months or so.

Part of moving to a new area is discovering its culinary offerings. It turns out that Woodbridge has just about every restaurant you can imagine--as long as your imagination is constrained by chain restaurants. Seriously, it's an urbanite's nightmare. One of the small handful of mom-and-pop type pizza places is a take-n-bake that was written up favorably in the Washington Post. It's located just down the street from us so I swung by to pick up a pie to cook in our new place (in a brand-new oven, I might add).

I was greeted nicely enough at Papa Petrone's Take 'N Bake by a thin, gray-haired, nimble man who quickly approached the counter from the back of the store. When I asked if they had salami as a topping (which at that point I could see was not on their menu) he quickly replied "no." He asked me in a cocky tone, "Where you from?" I looked up from the menu flier and said, "California originally." He squinted and looked at me like he was Philip Baker Hall and fired, "Californians don't know shit about pizza." Stunned, I chuckled and said, "Well I don't know about that, but no one seems to have salami any more." I proceeded to place my order (pepperoni, mushroom, and black olives for the curious) without incident.

I kept replaying the conversation in my head the entire way home, laughing harder with each time. Cynthia laughed hard for a while, too. Evidently salami is a taboo topping at Papa Petrone's.

Quick update:

I'm still off fast food, as long as Pizza Hut doesn't count.

I've been busy at work overseeing the installation of my new driving simulator.

I'm way, way, way behind in my reading for the year.

My wife and I have been busy getting our house ready to sell. Our first open house was this past Sunday.

My friend William started a blog.

I'm two weeks into my abstention from fast food and I'm cruising without much difficulty. I don't think it's the food that I enjoyed as much as the convenience. And let me tell you, the biggest temptation I've had so far had everything to do with hunger and convenience. I teach on Monday afternoons from 4:30 to 7:10. I try and eat a late lunch those days so I'm not dying from hunger by the end of class. By 7:30pm, though, I'm typically more than ready for a meal, and the $1 Double-Cheeseburger from McDonald's begins its siren song. This past Monday was no exception--I was plenty hungry after class and I didn't feel like making something when I got home. The smell from the campus Burger King was intoxicating, but I kept my resolve and asked my wife to start some food for me while I drove home. Other than that one episode, it hasn't been bad at all.

I haven't had fast food since before Ash Wednesday, so I decided that would be my sacrifice until Easter. For some of you, skipping McDonald's, BK, Taco Bell, et al. wouldn't be a challenge, but this ban will leave plenty of gaps in my weekly diet. Dave made a great point that the true purpose of the Lent sacrifice is to refocus one's attention on God. I must confess, though, that my exercise is rooted more in self-denial rather than in spiritual conditioning. Obviously these needn't be exclusive, but they seem to be so for me now.

Now on to practical matters: I need some opinions about what constitutes fast food. There are the obvious chains (McDonald's, BK, Taco Bell, KFC, and Wendy's), but what about sandwich shops and pizza? Do Subway and Quizno's count as fast food? What about Chipotle? My wife says if it's not fried, it's not fast food. Of course, that's not a perfect criterion, but it's a pretty good heuristic.