My father and I went to Dugan's Pub the other day so I could get my annual celebratory Buffalo chicken sandwich in honor of my upcoming birthday. This isn't a long-standing tradition. I discovered the sandwich somewhere in the last decade and, knowing that eating it on a regular basis would shorten my lifespan, have assigned it formal designation as a birthday treat.
The sandwich is a model of perfection. A full breast of chicken, butterflied, deep fried and Buffalo-ized in an amazing spicy, yet flavorful, red-orange sauce, covered with melted Swiss and served on a bun butch enough to hold up under pressure. Since I was already throwing caution (and several major arteries) to the wind, I went ahead and ordered the beer-battered fries as my side and didn't forget the bleu cheese dressing. It's Buffalo chicken, after all. Any other condiment (with the possible exception of ranch) is un-American.
The end result of eating the Dugan's Pub Buffalo chicken sandwich should come as no surprise. Sensations of burning, bloat and discomfort are immediately visited upon you, and again several hours later when the alien vacates its host body. Sweating, congestion, tears of shame and joy -- all the things you hope for when over-indulging in your favorite flavors and seeking a satisfyingly trough-like experience, leaving you emotionally drained from overwhelming satisfaction and self-loathing.
This year, all the effects were magnified exponentially.
Not only am I growing older, finding myself slightly less capable of tolerating such unbridled over-eating with the passing of each year, My Lovely Wife and I have also been making an effort since the start of 2016 to eat less like hormone-charged teenagers and more like responsible adults interested in meeting our grandchildren. Since January, I've lost close to twenty pounds and dropped two inches from my waistline. Shirts have gone from extra-large to large and I'm as close to not having a pot belly as I've been since graduating high school. While we have cut back on certain foods (I'm looking at you, breads and starches!) and reintroduced ourselves to daily portions of fruits of vegetables, the biggest factor for me has been portion control.
Left to my own devices, I'd eat and nibble and pick and peck and nosh and munch and crunch all day long on all the things I know I shouldn't be eating. Then, I'd sit down to a table three times a day and stuff myself. Even during past diets, I'd replace pretzels and chips with apples and carrots, yet I'd still cram those healthy items down my pie hole like a starved hyena gulping down a baby gazelle. This time around, I'm taking it seriously. Meal portions are reasonable, snacking is down to a bare minimum, water consumption could flood a small Texas town, exercise is more strategic, and foods and sundry ingredients are chosen with greater care.
Which is exactly why Dugan's Buffalo chicken sandwich and beer-battered fries were such a delicious, spice-coated, deep-fried offense to the senses. I've always known fries weren't good for me, but this was the first time in 48 years I could recall ever wishing I had ordered the broccoli florets or fruit cup instead. Not that the fries weren't awesome -- they were, and I ate every last one. Not that the chicken sandwich didn't meet my expectations -- it did, and I smiled and snorted all the way through it and went home with a red-orange tint around my mouth and finger tips. It's just that I was uncomfortably full for several hours.
You might be wondering what lesson I learned from this experience. As I'm fairly dim, with a memory that can be measured in nanoseconds, the answer is: probably none. Next May, I'll go to Dugan's Pub and order another Buffalo chicken sandwich. I might think about a healthy side, but that insanity will pass before the waitress arrives to take my order.
© 2016 Mark Feggeler
Showing posts with label healthy eating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label healthy eating. Show all posts
Friday, May 20, 2016
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Poison Veggie-Fruit, Anyone?
When I was a kid, my mother kept an impressive garden. It ran along one side of our suburban Long Island home and was accessible from the backyard. Following the final frost of spring, and lasting straight through to the first frost of fall, you could be certain to find a variety of fruits and vegetables sprouting, blooming, and yielding their harvests.
Although she might plant something new every now and then, there were staples on which you could rely. Tomatoes, of course, and string beans grew well, supported by the chain-link fencing surrounding our yard. Raspberries were a summer favorite. Mom made the best raspberry jam that never seemed to set up properly and, consequently, served as an excellent topping for vanilla ice cream. The tiny closet under the basement staircase was a treasure trove of mason jars filled to the rim with freshly boiled and packed preserves.
But there was one item Mom always planted that I never appreciated, mostly because it both confused and frightened me. I speak of rhubarb. The name alone is enough to cause confusion. What the heck is a rhubarb? Why is that unnecessary "h" crammed into the name?
All other naturally-growing and farmed foods make sense to me. An apple looks like an apple. String beans look like string beans. Even pumpkins and squash look like how you would imagine things named pumpkin and squash looking.
But rhubarb looks nothing like what you might think it should because rhubarb is a silly name with no suggestive descriptive qualities whatsoever, and I suppose that's understandable once you get a good look at a rhubarb plant.
Rhubarb has reddish-purple stalks that sprout a foot into the air like diseased celery and have such a tart flavor that they require an entire field of sugar cane just to make them edible. At the top of the plant are mismatched, dark green leaves that make you wonder if some weirdo snuck into your garden during the night and stapled kale to the top of your diseased celery stalks as a prank. And Mom was always quick to warn us against the poisonous qualities of rhubarb leaves.
"Don't eat the leaves!" she would say, as if my brothers and I were secretly scheming to raid the garden for a quick treat of raw rhubarb. You have to wonder who was the first person to figure out you could eat a plant with the color scheme of a poisonous frog and the mouth-puckering uber-tartness of a thousand Granny Smith apples.
That isn't merely an old wive's tale, either. If you eat enough rhubarb leaves -- 11 pounds, to be more precise -- you could end up dead. Not that I expect any of you to suddenly get a hankering for 11 pounds of tart leaves, but be warned that if you cook the leaves in soda you will increase the poison's potency, meaning you might only need seven or eight pounds to make you drop dead. If only because it would be the most disgusting food you ever tasted, don't do it.
To confuse matters even more, the United States government has officially declared rhubarb a fruit, regardless of the fact it has a stalk like celery, leaves like salad, and bears absolutely no fruit. That's kind of like setting aside the fact the platypus is part mammal and part fowl and declaring it a member of the mollusk family just for poops and giggles.
Throughout the years since my childhood, I have learned to enjoy the flavors of many of the suspiciously healthy items at which I once turned up my nose. Cauliflower, carrots, broccoli and many more now cross my plate with no chance of not being eaten, but so far I have managed to keep rhubarb at a safe distance. I plan to keep it that way.
© 2013 Mark Feggeler
Although she might plant something new every now and then, there were staples on which you could rely. Tomatoes, of course, and string beans grew well, supported by the chain-link fencing surrounding our yard. Raspberries were a summer favorite. Mom made the best raspberry jam that never seemed to set up properly and, consequently, served as an excellent topping for vanilla ice cream. The tiny closet under the basement staircase was a treasure trove of mason jars filled to the rim with freshly boiled and packed preserves.
But there was one item Mom always planted that I never appreciated, mostly because it both confused and frightened me. I speak of rhubarb. The name alone is enough to cause confusion. What the heck is a rhubarb? Why is that unnecessary "h" crammed into the name?
All other naturally-growing and farmed foods make sense to me. An apple looks like an apple. String beans look like string beans. Even pumpkins and squash look like how you would imagine things named pumpkin and squash looking.
But rhubarb looks nothing like what you might think it should because rhubarb is a silly name with no suggestive descriptive qualities whatsoever, and I suppose that's understandable once you get a good look at a rhubarb plant.
"Don't eat the leaves!" she would say, as if my brothers and I were secretly scheming to raid the garden for a quick treat of raw rhubarb. You have to wonder who was the first person to figure out you could eat a plant with the color scheme of a poisonous frog and the mouth-puckering uber-tartness of a thousand Granny Smith apples.
That isn't merely an old wive's tale, either. If you eat enough rhubarb leaves -- 11 pounds, to be more precise -- you could end up dead. Not that I expect any of you to suddenly get a hankering for 11 pounds of tart leaves, but be warned that if you cook the leaves in soda you will increase the poison's potency, meaning you might only need seven or eight pounds to make you drop dead. If only because it would be the most disgusting food you ever tasted, don't do it.
To confuse matters even more, the United States government has officially declared rhubarb a fruit, regardless of the fact it has a stalk like celery, leaves like salad, and bears absolutely no fruit. That's kind of like setting aside the fact the platypus is part mammal and part fowl and declaring it a member of the mollusk family just for poops and giggles.
Throughout the years since my childhood, I have learned to enjoy the flavors of many of the suspiciously healthy items at which I once turned up my nose. Cauliflower, carrots, broccoli and many more now cross my plate with no chance of not being eaten, but so far I have managed to keep rhubarb at a safe distance. I plan to keep it that way.
© 2013 Mark Feggeler
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