Fast Food Filosophy

Why do places like McDonald's, Hungry Jacks and KFC have dining rooms in their stores? When it comes to eating fast food in place of a real meal, I have a very firm 'Fast Food Filosophy'* that to me, seems to make these dining rooms defunct.

My 'Filosophy' is that if I'm feeling too lazy to cook myself a meal or even microwave myself something from the freezer, then I'm definitely too lazy to park the car, walk into the restaurant and stand around waiting for my food to be ready. Why do all that when I can get the same end result from the climate controlled comfort of my car?

It seems like a pretty sound Philosophy to me. Long live the Drive-Thru**!



* that's Philosophy with an 'F', because everyone knows that when it comes to big brand marketing, you're able to use phonetic spelling to make things seem cooler to younger generations.

** Another excellent example of embracing bad spelling.

Man vs Food

After a month of non-stop writing, I feel a bit guilty for not having written anything since Monday. But it’s been one of those weeks where my brain just hasn’t wanted to work in a way that is capable of stringing whole sentences together that are worth reading. I think I need a holiday.


Last night I was introduced to the wondrous TV show that is ‘Man vs. Food’. Basically a guy travels around the USA finding the massivest meals he can, and taking on restaurant challenges to eat them. I watched him attempt to eat a 7 ½ pound hamburger in under an hour. Having just eaten dinner myself, it seemed even more sickening, because with a full stomach I couldn’t even contemplate the idea of someone attempting to eat a burger that big. The fact that we had a Greek food banquet for dinner and probably ate a couple of pounds of food ourselves seemed insignificant compared to this burger.


What really got me about the show was the part of the episode that introduced me to a dish I had never heard of before, and something that convinced me that the higher the population gets in a country, the more willing the people become to eat anything they can dream up, no matter how bizarre or sickeningly fatty.

That dish was ‘Chicken Fried Steak’.
Someone takes a piece of steak, coats it in flour and deep fries the sucker until it’s crispy. Then it gets slathered with gravy and voila - your deep fried dinner is complete.

I can’t believe someone came up with a dish like that. Who in the world decided that steak was something that could do with deep frying? Of course, I would definitely eat it – how could I not when my love of unhealthy food is so great? It’s still pretty gross though.


The fact that the guy on this TV show is able to find so many enormous meals is amazing. I don’t think food like that exists here in Australia. Sure, we have restaurants that advertise that they serve extra-large meal sizes, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so fantastically huge as some of the things he eats. The only thing I can ever recall coming across that was big enough to rate as a dish on that show was served at 'The Great Australian Ice-Creamery'. It was called ‘the kitchen sink’ and was basically a 9 litre ice cream sundae. It had every flavour and every topping, and they served it in a mini sink-shaped dish.
Now that is a challenge that I definitely couldn’t do – I struggle to eat a regular serve of ice-cream, so 9 litres would never, ever happen.



I may have to rethink my idea of a trip to the US, because there's a very good chance that with junk food available to me in sizes like that, my trip could end with a heart attack rather than a flight home.

I think I’ll just have to watch the rest of the Man vs Food series so I can enjoy my love of junk food vicariously while it clogs someone else’s arteries instead of my own.

B & E Fridays

No, this is not a post about some secret weekly criminal habit of mine. It’s a post about eating, which is much safer, easier to do more often and I’m sure infinitely more satisfying than breaking & entering.

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One of the things I miss the most about my old job is Bacon & Egg Fridays. The sandwich shop near my old work made the most fantastic two-egg and bacon toasted sandwiches. Slightly runny egg yolks, soft bacon, thick fresh bread and just the right amount of butter and salt. I think this approximates to about one metric heart-attack’s worth of butter per sandwich or some similar technical measurement. You could feel your arteries hardening with every bite, but you didn’t care because they were pure heaven.

*what the internet does not allow you to see at this point is me pausing to wipe the drool from my keyboard at the thought of these glorious sandwiches*

Bacon and Egg Fridays made what is already the best day of the working week even better. Sadly, after changing jobs, I am now without a sandwich shop. This means that Bacon & Egg Fridays are a thing of the past. My heart is saying thank you, but the rest of me is devastated.

Normally, I don’t eat breakfast at all. It’s not that I don’t like breakfast, it’s just that I can’t be bothered. I’m lazy, and I don’t usually get hungry until about midday anyway. Bacon & Egg Fridays were my one day a week of providing my body with the sustenance it needed to make it through to lunch. You need that extra push on Fridays, especially if you’ve had a week as busy as the one I’ve just had.

So I think that tomorrow, because it’s been a busy week and because the cold weather has started to properly set in, I might drag myself out of bed just that teensy bit earlier than usual and make a stop out of my way at a sandwich shop to resurrect Bacon & Egg Fridays just for one day.

Chicken Parma

This Sunday we’re taking a trip to Alexandra at sunrise to take some photos. It’s surrounded by mountains and pretty dense forest, so should make for some great landscape photography, particularly if there is a bit of mist hanging around as the sun rises.

Afterwards, we’re having lunch at the Commercial Hotel, which is the part I’m looking forward to most because they’re widely known throughout Victoria for having an incredible 30 different kinds of Parma on their menu.


Chicken Parma would have to be in my top 10 favourite meals (which are mostly made up of comfort foods) – as I’m pretty sure it is for most Australians. Parmigiana is a term that’s used pretty broadly here. Aussie Chicken Parma is not very close to traditional parmigiana. Usually in your typical pub, it’s a chicken schnitzel topped with Napoli sauce and cheese. But it’s also been extended so that it really covers putting any kind of topping on chicken schnitzel.

A while ago we stopped randomly at a pub that had a small chicken Parma menu. I don’t remember them all, but I remember that the one I had was topped with egg, bacon and cheese, and the whole lot was grilled so that the cheese was crispy, but the egg yolk was still a bit runny.
Heaven.

It took me about 20 minutes to decide on that one from a menu of about 8 different types – I can’t imagine how long it will take me to decide from a list of 30.

Its’ a tough choice –do I go with safe and innocent, like the ‘Italian’, or do I go right out there and choose something that I would never think to put on top of chicken if I were making it myself, like the ‘Bananarama Parma’? And most importantly, can you pass up something as glorious as the ‘Nacho Parma’? Because if there are two kinds of food that were ever meant to be combined, it was these. Although maybe Nacho Parma is more of a late night drunken food because it combines the beauty of one of the world’s greatest drunk foods with one of the world’s greatest comfort foods.


So any suggestions on which one might be the best choice are more than welcome, and I’ll definitely post some photos of whichever one I end up choosing – it is supposed to be a photography trip after all.

Chocolate

Work has been really busy lately because we had a stand at an expo in Sydney this week, and I’ve been running around like crazy getting things sorted. One of the main things that I had to organise was a give-away for the show – something that would make people come over and talk to the guys.
This is what I ended up with:




That is one seriously big block of chocolate.
Naturally, because the block was such a huge novelty, the guys got excited about the chocolate and ended up giving away not just one, but five of these enormous hunks of chocolaty goodness. Once they got back to Melbourne, I discovered that the name on top of the winners list was mine – the boss had decided that since I came up with such a fantastic idea, I should get to have one.

It was all very nice of him, but while I may be addicted to many and varied things, chocolate just isn’t one of them. Now if it had been a 10kg box of jelly-belly jellybeans that might have been a different story...

So this morning, we called everyone into the office and I officially opened the enormous box and dished out large hunks of chocolate to everyone who works in the building. It seemed like a good way to reduce the vast quantity of chocolate, but in fact, after handing out large slabs to everyone, I still have most of the thing left. What am I going to do with 8kg of chocolate?!
As I see it, these are my options so far:

• Melt it down and mould a small house, Hansel & Gretel witch style.
• Bake a really, really, really, really big chocolate cake.
• Eat until I lapse into a diabetic coma.
• Melt it down and use one of the fountains in the Carlton Gardens that they’ve had to shut off due to drought to make the world’s biggest chocolate fountain.
• Give it away.

What to do, what to do....
All ideas are welcome. It’s a lot of chocolate so chances are I can do more than one of these things with it.

Popcorn Overkill

I've just been to the movies, where I ate a carton of popcorn that was roughly twice the size of my head. I feel a little sick now.

Psychic Lunch

There are several food shops near work and we rotate between these for our lunches. It’s a very healthy choice of Noodles, Fish & Chips, Pies, Chinese, Kebabs or Charcoal Chicken (which a friend recently told me is a store concept that hasn’t caught on in America - but that’s a whole other story.)

There are about 5 of us in the office and we all eat lunch together (awww, like a big family!). A co-worker asked me earlier to think about which shop I wanted to eat from. I thought about it for a little while, and decided on a kebab, because even though kebabs are usually hangover food the kebab shop near work is absolutely stellar and you can almost pretend that it’s healthy because of the salad.

Just as I was about to pick up the phone to let him know, my mobile rang and it was KJ, whose first words were “Hi, do you want a kebab for lunch?”

How did he know!!?? Is it possible that by spending so much time together, our brains have tuned into the same wavelength in some way? This sort of thing happens to us all the time. Or perhaps I like food so much that I’m subconsciously sending out psychic brainwaves.

Either way, I’m happy because I get my kebab.

Bucket o' Coma

I have a bucket of Maltesers. That's 1/2 a kilogram of crisp malt centres covered with smooth milk chocolate. If I don't hide them soon, I will have an empty bucket, and probably some kind of weird diabetic coma.

Lazy Town

There is a segment on the morning radio show that I listen to called ‘Lazy Town’. People call in and talk about the laziest thing they’ve ever done. Like the guy who drove around with his fuel light on all day, then drove into a service station that night, looked at the pump, thought to himself ‘I can’t be bothered’ and drove off, only to run out of petrol about 2km up the road.

A girl rang in to say that when she wants to use the phone at home but can’t be bothered getting up to get it, she rings her house, pretends to be someone else and asks to speak to herself so that someone will bring her the cordless phone.

This has got me thinking about the lazy things that I often do. I’m not sure that I can meet the super lazy standards of the petrol man, however I think I could probably come close.

Tonight I couldn’t be bothered stopping on the way home from work to get something for dinner. The cupboards are bare (yet again) and instead of popping down to the shops to get something nutritious and wholesome, I once again ate whatever the cupboard coughed up. Microwave meat pie, hot chocolate and original flavoured Doritos.

That is how lazy I am. 10 minutes of time in the car and at the supermarket and I could have had something great, but I was too lazy. It’s a sickness, really.

I’d like to hear other people’s lazy stories – hopefully there is someone out there lazier than I am!