Out to lunch

She put the menu down and said, “No more salads.”

My quizzical look led to, “I’ve eaten more chicken Caesar salads than I can count. Once or twice when I really wanted a salad is OK, but somehow I seem to have adopted the idea that when I go out for lunch I have become the abstemious adherent to spartan eating…which I am most certainly not. Look at me. Do I look like someone who regularly dines on low calorie foods?”

“I actually have a friend who once told me that she thought there was a connection between chicken Caesar salad and breast cancer since most of her acquaintances who had BC, also ate lots of chicken Caesar salad. I don’t believe that, but…”

Ordering salads seems the socially correct thing to do even though no one believes that given more unfettered choices, a salad is what you really wanted to eat.

Think about it. A luscious chicken pot pie or a dish of limp green things.

A juicy hamburger covered with bacon on a brioche roll or chicken breast, romaine and croutons in a bowl.

Neither of us looked like women who ate a lot of salads.

Yes, there are thin people who order salads for lunch and some even order them for dinner.

I have several friends who fit this description. I often wonder if there is something wrong with their taste buds, but they don’t seem unhappy and they are thin so there are tradeoffs.

Eating with them is a special challenge.

Do you just forge ahead and eat what you want with the off chance that someone will think, “Hide the tablecloth before she eats that too.”

Or, do you smile and order, let’s say the house special salad which includes sugared cranberries, slivered almonds, sunflower seeds and bacon bits, which looks like a salad but packs the same caloric punch as steak and potatoes?

My friend who had just confessed to her gustatory lies picked up the menu and sitting back with a new found purpose perused the more caloric offerings and said, “I think I’ll have a Reuben. I love Reubens. Maybe, if it isn’t too filling I’ll have a dessert.”

Boy, she was going off the deep end. Lost compete control.

Caught up in the maelstrom of unfettered choice, I ordered my favorite, a chicken salad sandwich complete with its caloric mayonnaise, but asked that it be served on whole wheat bread.

That was to add a sense that I might have a passing idea about good nutrition and, truth be told, after my friend mentioned dessert, my eyes wandered to that section of the menu where I spied Key Lime Pie.

One’s mind can enter into silent negotiations so easily.

I thought that if I ate only half of the sandwich…taking the remaining half home for dinner or maybe a snack before dinner, I could have a dessert.

One can lie to one’s self with great panache.

Our sandwiches, along with potato chips and pickles arrived just after we finished the complimentary slices of homemade banana bread.

I mean, what could you do? The cook had gone to all that trouble to make the banana bread and if we left it on the table, it might hurt his or her feelings.

And, we didn’t order it. It simply appeared on the table and that does discount any negatives about sugar, etc.

We did seem a lot more animated with food that we actually liked.

The antioxidants in the Cabernet Sauvignon helped too.

Then we ordered a dessert to split…

Some sense of limits had reappeared.

I did bring my half chicken salad sandwich home and it became the centerpiece of my spouse’s supper….

Hey, whatever works.