Tags
You might think it’s great to know all the secrets of the menu. Without having to bother any one, I already know what salad dressings there are. I know which side dishes are left. I can remember which items we’ve currently run out of. There are endless combinations to the meals that I can eat, and I know about every single one of them.
So what’s the problem with that? It sounds like I’ve got an endless list of meal options, and all I need to do is pick one. Right?
You’re close. But it’s really not that easy.
Once you narrow the menu down, often times there are very few things to choose from. Most restaurants limit what their employees can eat, within good reason. You can’t go and give away ten of your finest, most expensive steaks to your employees every night. Especially when they don’t always eat very much of it. Steaks aside, things like seafood, desserts, and appetizers are usually the first off your list. After that, anything that’s running as a special for the night is a big no-no as well, considering that it’s only running for one night and thus, only so many are available.
Once those options are out of the way, you have to remember how many things there are that you don’t even like to eat. Liverwurst and onion sandwich? NO THANKS. Anything with swiss cheese? PASS. Is it spicy, or sour? By this point, I think someone is just trying to starve me.
The hardest for me is figuring out exactly how hungry I am. Can I eat a whole cheeseburger right now? I almost never finish my burgers, while working or otherwise, so probably not. Is an order of toast too small? Definitely. How monks manage to live on bread and water is a pretty big mystery to me.
After establishing how hungry I am, I generally try to remember what I’ve been eating lately. My first three or four months of working at this place, my meals seemed to circle around nothing but omelets and pancakes. Literally, for a month straight I ate nothing but omelets. Spinach and feta, or tomato and cheese, were the only variations I accepted. They were just so good!!!
Now, put some eggs in front of me, and I gag. I can’t stand them anymore. Literally ate them until I hated them.
The same went for pancakes. When I needed a break from eggs, I got myself a couple pancakes. Soon I was on to french toast. French toast with strawberries. French toast with cream cheese. French toast with strawberries AND cream cheese…. I think you get the idea. These too, I grew tired of. Lucky for me, my love of french toast is just too vast, and I can still eat it should I be in the mood.
By the time summer was over and fall came around, I was so disgusted with breakfast foods it wasn’t even funny. My co-worker, who shall forever be known as Kiwi, suggested I try a sandwich instead. Oh the choices that opened up to me!! Grilled cheese, with tomato or ham or bacon should the mood suit me. Cheese steaks, Rubens, tuna/chicken/egg/shrimp salad. BLTs. Rolls, kaiser rolls, bread, wraps.
It was awesome. Kind of. Some of the things were okay. They didn’t taste bad, but they weren’t something I’d ever order again. Other things were just gross. I didn’t like them at all, and threw them out after two bites. The only saving grace I have is Kiwi.
Kiwi likes to share food, especially if it involves two really tasty things. We’ll each order what we want, grab some extra plates, and dig in. We split each thing up, and eat until we’re about to explode. We do this a lot with burgers, or pancakes. Usually when we share, we just get one meal and a couple of sides. We each take half the pancakes, but she likes a side of ham while I prefer a side of porkroll. In the long run, it works out pretty well. Especially if I want to try something, and I’m not sure if I’ll like it.
Some nights, I don’t eat at all. Either I’m not hungry, or for some reason, everything just seems really gross. Other nights, it seems like I just can’t stop. Recently, I had a night where no matter what, I was constantly hungry. My body must have been craving some major nutrients. A small side salad (with two kinds of salad dressing), a toasted kaiser roll, a cup of soup. All eaten at various times. At one point I broke down and swiped myself a piece of apple pie. To be fair, it was the last one and looked like someone had stepped on it. But that wasn’t enough. The pie needed ice cream, and wet-walnuts. I needed to drink milk while eating. And STILL, I was starving.
After I went home I proceeded to eat some fruit, some Ramen noodles that I cheated with and microwaved so I didn’t have to wait for boiling water. I drank a load of juice. I hadn’t slept well before going to work, so really, I think my body was just running low on energy and craving lots of food in order to keep myself going. But still, considering I have a hard time eating a whole bagel by myself, or finishing a McDonald’s burger because I ate all my fries first…. That was a lot of food.
So yeah. It’s great. I can think of a million ideas for a meal you might want to eat. I can suggest sides that go great with your steak, I can tell you how awesome our homemade soups are, I can even tell you ahead of time that we’ve run out of rolls and list the various options you can have instead.
But the one thing I can’t do?
Pick a meal for myself.
