Butchered

When it comes to food, I’m pretty much a quality over quantity guy. That doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy large quantities of good quality food on occasion. But if given a choice between a five pound poutine from Smoke’s Poutinerie and a 12oz steak from DelMonico Steakhouse in Vegas, the steak will always win.

Unless it’s late and I’m fairly drunk. But I digress. This post is about meat.

I don’t eat McDonald’s. I last time I had some McDonald’s was on September 28 2004 – 6 years, 5 months, 8 days ago. It was all because of Morgan Spurlock and this:

Remember this? Well, it put me off fries for a while, and off McDonald’s for good.

I told you this post is about meat. A few weeks ago, a Facebook friend shared a link to this video:

It’s over ten minutes long, and it’s in French. But you have to see this. This guy will show you how to take old spoiled meat and repackage it as new meat. A practice – he says – that’s fairly common in various grocery stores. It’s disgusting.

Of course, it might be all false, might be the guy’s imagination. He might be a disgruntled employee trying to get back at the store who fired him.

But would you take that chance?

I now buy all my meat from an actual butcher – a place where the butcher cuts the meat right in front of me. Because the alternative would be to go off meat, and that’s just crazy.

Food for Thought

A few weeks ago the Africa Project Peeps gathered for one last time. We had drinks, exchanged a few stories, and wrapped-up the Africa Project.

The food was fabulous. Here’s a few pictures of some of the main courses:

Mystery Food #1

Mystery Food #2

Mystery Food #3

Can you guess what the meals are? Can you guess which of these three meals is mine?

Of course, this is not a contest, there will be no prize awarded as I suck at sending and/or getting prizes – just ask Poppy. 😉

2nd Rate Citizen

Nothing makes me feel more like a second rate citizen then summer rolling around at my workplace.

This is a map of the places to get food or coffee on campus from September to the end of April. Click to embiggify. 

This is a map of the food places where we used to be able to get food on campus, but now that the sutdents are gone for the summer can’t stay open for the 5,000 employees only. Click to embiggify. 

• Red dots mean closed for the summer.
  
• Yellow dots mean reduced business hours for the summer (normally just open for lunch).
  
• Green dots mean open as usual.

Please note that the north green dot is a Second Cup that’s not on campus. The south one is a pharmacy that sells plastic (wrapped) sandwiches and soft drinks.

Anyways, every year it’s the same thing and regardless of the multiple food surveys we fill every semester asking for some kind of decent food service over the summer we’ll probably never get anything done about this because it’s a numbers game.

40,000 people (35,000 students + 5,000 employees) is a much bigger number than 5,000 employees. But I think the fact that those 5,000 employees are the ones who make the business go is easily dismissed when we start putting profit above people.

I could go on about this all day, but I won’t. I’ll just leave you with this thought:

How come summer hours for employees only start June 1st, but all the food places are closed for the summer starting May 1st?

::Sigh::

The DINK Lifestyle : a recap

Today the kids are coming back home. We did miss them, but tried to stay busy and not mope too much while they were not there. To alleviate the pain (har har) we tried to go out for dinner every single night.

Sunday: Drove back from Sherbrooke and went to see the Dark Knight. Awesome, but New-York Fries was out of fries.

Monday: Went to Les Fougères and had their 14th anniversary tasting menu with the wines. It was excellent. The last time I felt this full was when we went there almost five years ago.

Tuesday: Had dinner at Pub Italia. Pizza was great, mussels were excellent. Beer was really good. I’m thinking this is the perfect spot for an office party.

Wednesday: Dinner at the HRC in Ottawa. As usual, it was pretty good. Long Island Iced Teas for me, some frozen pink drinks for Lovely Wife.

Thursday: We went to Meule et Caquelon, and had a real Raclette du Valais. The service was slow, but the food was good.

Friday: X-Files and fries. That was very good. Yes, I mean the fries.

Saturday: Food at Le Troquet for lunch, and then The Works for dinner. Had a really amazing burger and shared a litre of shake with Lovely Wife. Then we came back home and played American Idol Encore on the Wii. 😉

Now excuse me while I go formulate a plan to lose that extra 10 pounds I just gained typing this recap.