15 July 2016

Culinary Catastrophes

Some kind of flower that was probably tastier than my dinner.



Has this ever happened to you - You go out to a restaurant, order an average meal with the rest of your friends, and when it comes, something is just... off about it. I am always the lucky one in the bunch that gets the mispackaged, wrong ingredient, somewhat out of kilter meal. There's a lot of things I can't eat, so I don't go near them. I'm not picky, really, but sometimes I just want to have an ingredient left off my food. 


Take cilantro, for example. I'm one of the people that thinks cilantro tastes like soap. But I love Mexican food. So I ask for it without cilantro. Usually if there are a few flakes of it in the food, I'm okay. I'm trying to build up a tolerance, since it seems to be integral to Mexican cooking. I got to the point where I can eat a dish with a sprinkling of cilantro on it. Good, right? 


So tonight we go out to a Mexican restaurant, I order tacos al pastor. I figure it would have some cilantro in it. No big deal. My dinner comes, and my poor tacos are covered with two fistfuls of cilantro. Man sized fistfuls. My tacos looked like a green Irish field. And it was mostly stems. I can tolerate chopped up leaves, but stems taste more like a soap dish than anything I've encountered. I spent five minutes picking my tacos reasonably clean. Ate them with a few leaves. Washed them down with a margarita I had the foresight to order. Debated a second margarita, but decided it was only a one margarita catastrophe. 


It wouldn't have been so bad, but for lunch the office ordered sandwiches from a local deli-like place. I got the red pepper hummus with cheddar, avocado mash, cukes, lettuce and tomatoes. It looked okay when I unwrapped it. After a few bites I grew suspicious and opened it up. Sure enough, my red pepper hummus sandwich had no hummus on it. And the piece of cheese was the size of a strip of jerky. I was basically eating a salad, on bread. Not what I envisioned for lunch. 


So my day is 0 for 2. Even the margarita couldn't put the day's culinary input in the win margin.  The only saving grace to the day was a wayward peanut butter cup and a strong mug of chai tea. 


How has your week been, food wise? 

5 comments:

Oonah said...

Not a story you want to hear, Connie! Icecream -- I am supposed to be dieting and I am eating ICECREAM!

Kathleen Cassen Mickelson said...

Ha! Some days are like that. We went out for tapas last night, which was perfect. We tried shrimp skewers, empanadas, some potato thing that looked like a cup filled with shredded salad and melted cheese, corn on the cob sprinkled with some delectable cheese, and a tres leche dessert. But I stayed away from the tequila Mick ordered. Not a bad culinary Friday at all.

Constance Brewer said...

Oonah - but ice cream has dairy, which is good for you. Right??

Constance Brewer said...

Kath, your dinner sounds better than my food for the day. Here's hoping today will bring me the food I ordered!

Gabriele Campbell said...

I have that problem with salt. A little bit of salt adds taste but too much of it .... ewwww. The french fries at MacD are one of the worst offenders. If I order a meal, I'll tell them to put a portion off before it comes near any salt, and then add pepper instead. (Yeah, I probably should not eat at MacD at all, but sometimes I don't feel like cooking the day before, and don't have the time to sit in a Greek or Italian restaurant and wait for lunch, so a Royal TS it is.)