Unless You Have Self-Governing Innards, Avoid Any Opportunity Allowing You The Possibility Of Consuming More Than Your Stomach Was Meant To Hold

For July 21, 2010

You can only eat so much, you know? • Elvis Presley

It is difficult to find a good meal when you’re on the road. I like home cooking for reasons too numerous to go into here, in part because most of what I encounter in restaurants sounds better than it tastes. Menu descriptions are enticing, but the plate seldom delivers what the words and pictures promise. Even finding a green salad—the meal I really crave—can be challenging.

Sometimes I consider visiting an all-you-can-eat buffet so I can load up on spinach and broccoli and tomatoes and carrots and a garden of other goodies, but these fiestas of food are not a bargain for someone like me who prefers multiple small meals to gorging myself by taking in a week’s worth in an hour.

I know that’s what these purveyors of excess are counting on, that for every overeater, there’ll be several of us who want to stop before we’re stuffed beyond capacity. They make their money off the likes of me and not on those folks who keep heapin’ the goodies on plate after gravy-dripping plate. I watch in amazement as people who can eat all they want by returning to the steam-table trough pile their platters high, mounding the stuff as though they have to get all they can consume at once.

Miss Piggy said you should never eat more than you can lift. I say you should never lift more than you can comfortably eat and you certainly shouldn’t put it onto a plate or two or three or more and plow through it as though you’d never get to eat again. I also say that you should travel with some dried fruit and granola bars just in case you need them.

When you’re on the road, what foods do you long for?

It is really wonderful how men of refined tastes and pampered habits, who at home are as fastidious as luxury and a delicate appetite can make them, find it in their hearts – or stomachs either – to gorge such disgusting masses of stringy meat and tepid vegetables, and to go about their business again under the fond delusion that they have dined. • George G. Foster (1814-1856), columnist writing about “eating houses” in New York City’s financial district

My time is up at this connecting point. More later. Perhaps much later!

Foodish Thoughts From The Road: Do Not Be Tempted By The Deep-Fried Twinkies®!

For July 17, 2010

Health food may be good for the conscience, but Oreos taste a heck of a lot better. • Robert Redford

I have sacrificed myself on the altar of bad taste and sampled a deep-fried Twinkie® so that you do not have to. This makes me both saint and sinner.

My desires are generally modest. I hunt for rubber alligators, globes, robots, masks, and other affordable art and artifacts. Sometimes my goals are even more modest. During my latest visit to Sin City, I set my heart not on ogling the dancers in topless reviews or plugging my pennies into slot machines or admiring the latest Soleil incarnation, but on sampling the ultimate in junk food: a deep-fried Twinkie®. I am a cheap date. Ninety-nine cents and I was delighted.

Until I took a bite.

The crème-filled spongecake on a stick is dipped in funnel cake batter and fried in hot oil. Then it’s topped with powdered sugar and chocolate jimmies. It is execrable. Seriously. This doesn’t even sound good, does it? I’ve seen people on the Travel Channel and the TV Food Network rhapsodize about this so-called treat. I fail to understand why.

The best part of the crusty concoction—the crème—is gone, melted and absorbed into the surrounding cake. This does not help the flavor of the cake. The whole mess becomes tooth-achingly sweet. I took one bite from the inside (I already know what funnel cake crusty stuff tastes like) and threw the rest into the trash where it belonged.

Don’t do it. Pass up the deep-fried Twinkies®. I suspect you’d be wise to forgo the similarly-prepared Oreos® as well. My self-sacrifice did not extend that far.

What have you eaten that proved to be a disappointment?

For my college students, I do have your breakfast available: Snickers and Mt. Dew. And for the Breakfast of Champions, I have cold beer.• Amtrak lounge car breakfast announcement, 8 :03 a.m. Monday, June 14, 2010