more articles... and my white-bread restaurant

Today I'm catching up on my news reading, hence my newsie posts. I'm now reading the comments for an article on health inspection of restaurants.

Fernando and I often eat at Scores, a very run-of-the-mill family restaurant. (I hesitate to call it a white-bread restaurant though. The croutons are multi-ethnic.) It is certainly not a *foodie* sort of a place. But I like it because (a) there are few interesting restaurants along our bus routes; (b) we just go for the salad bar, so it's inexpensive; (c) it's relatively healthy, versus much of the processed crapitude in low-mid-expense restaurants; (d) it's clean, including the bathrooms; and (e) the service is uniformly excellent.

I think the last two points are probably connected to how safe the food is. You can only have that level of cheerful and efficient service (every single time we go, from every single staff member) if there's good management; and where there's good management, there will probably be food-safety. Ditto with the bathrooms, as confirmed by this guy who commented on the article I just read: "Ps if the washrooms are clean and scrubbed and well stocked, chances are the kitchen will not kill you. Just my experience as a chef of 25 years."

a little humour

This is just randomly amusing.

Olympic swim superman dude, Michael Phelps, eats 12 000 calories a day. Which just shows, you know, that we could all be eating as much crap as we want if only we'd be willing to exercise all the rest of our waking hours. -->The closest I came to this was when my jaw was wired shut after an operation and I had to eat through a straw. I would end each day with a chocolate milkshake to bring up my calorie count. Sweeet.

Anyway, this is a funny article of a food critic trying to keep up with Phelps. It greatly resembles my own life.

*

No one would ever confuse me with an Olympic athlete. I was picked last in softball and the last time I was competitive about anything, it was apathy (remember being in your 20s?).

...

So I head to nearest body of water. ... It's adult swim time and the grown-ups are swimming laps. An old man swims width-wise across the pool. It's not clear if he's crazy or just a jerk. ... I swim a lap. This pool must be much larger than an Olympic pool because I get tired very quickly. Having achieved a small victory with my lap I go out on a high note, at the peak of my performance ability.

...

Any serious athlete is up before dawn to train. I rise at 4 a.m., stretch, walk to the bathroom, urinate, and head back to bed.

...

I receive a devastating piece of news. "A lap is generally there and back," says Zach Weston, professor of kinesiology at Wilfrid Laurier University. "A length is just there."

Cutting off my citrus supply route!

All the cookbooks I own use fresh-this and fresh-that, such as fresh lemon juice. I still stick to my bottles because it's easier to have on hand, and to take out just the amount I need etc. But when I ran out of lemon juice this summer and tried to buy more, Maxi was always out--though I was able to buy fresh lemons.

Sure enough, there has been a Lemon Shortage! How alarming! How shocking! Surely a harbinger of worse things to come! And now I've been forced to become one of those Fresh Lemon Cooking people. Hmph!