Ok I give in. Waitressing pet peeves.

I avoided doing this blog for a long time because I think it is so overdone, but I cannot help but continue to be both fascinated and horrified on a daily basis of people's social and eating habits. As the granddaughter of the queen of grammar and etiquette, I was raised to have good table manners...or else. Nothing fancy like knowing where the shrimp fork goes, just things that I personally consider common sense. When you want something, say please, and when you receive it, say thank you. Don't chew with your mouth open, don't play with your food, etc. However, I have discovered that many people I have waited on over the past 6 years seemed to have missed these lessons, but somehow they are allowed to dine in public places regardless of how disastrous their manners are. I'll start with examples of general rudeness:

Me: "Hello ma'am, how are you doing today?"
Customer: "Sweet tea."

Me: "Can I get y'all anything right now?"
Child: "WHERE'S MY CHICKEN FINGERS?"

Me: "Ok guys, I've got a large pepperoni pizza?"
Customers: (dumb silence as the pan continues to grow increasingly hot against my hand)

Manners are the worst thing I have to deal with, but watching people eat can be pretty terrible too. Some habits are gross, and some are just weird. The other day, for example, a woman ordered a calzone. Rather than cut into the giant mound of bread and cheese with a knife and fork, however, she began by picking it up and meticulously brushing off the crumbs from the plate. She then tilted the plate up as if she was looking into one of those adjustable mirrors, and began to pick at the vegetables inside, pausing every few minutes to brush away more crumbs. I'm guessing she was OCD, but my fellow waitresses and I could not help but watch in fascination as she demolished her calzone piece by tiny piece. Other times are less fascinating, and more disgusting. People trying to ask for things while still chewing is particularly gross, as I cannot help but notice the half-chewed piece of pizza being passed around in their mouth. I thought people learned not to do that by the time they reached third grade. And of course, most tables tend to require at least a bucketful of ranch with every pizza.

Want to know an interesting fact? I actually like waiting tables. Sure I complain, but I'm pretty sure any job has its downsides, and this is just one more thing to write about.

Salads and their pointlessness in dieting

I hate dieting. Most people know this about me due to the fact that no matter how much I complain about my figure, I continue to eat basically the same foods. I have found that if you want to lose weight, the absolute worst thing you can do is go on a "diet" and decide to cut things entirely out of your diet. In my experience, this will only lead to failure and general hatred towards the world at large when in the presence of carbohydrates. Rather than be extreme and cut things completely, simply eat less of it and more of healthy things, exercise, and eat smaller portions. It's simple.

Salads in particular are one of the worst mistakes of dieting. Not to say that salads are not good for you or not delicious, because I personally love vegetables and eat salads whether I am dieting or not for both the taste and nutritional value. However, my boyfriend introduced me to a phrase the other day which I have found to describe salads perfectly: "just enough food to piss me off." The other day I was feeling particularly defeated when I looked at myself in the mirror, analyzing every pooch and roll and mentally beating myself up for gaining weight over the summer. So when I went to work that day at 4, I decided to eat a salad for dinner rather than a hoagie to cut down on carbs. As I spent the next 7 hours waiting tables and carrying fresh, cheesy pizzas to tables, this proved to be a terrible mistake. The energy lasted me for maybe 2 hours, and only made me more hungry. I learned the other day that professional eaters expand their stomach by eating massive amounts of lettuce, which expand the stomach. So, when people eat nothing but salads for diets, they are actually expanding their stomach's capacities for taking in food, making it harder to become full when they get around to eating real food again, making the diet pointless.

Extreme Couponing

So, as you have probably gathered by the subject matter of my blog, I'm kinda broke. I've become fascinated with the show "Extreme Couponing" and have recently become determined to use more coupons to save money. One problem is that most of those things have little nutritional benefit, like getting 75 cents of 2 boxes of Hot Pockets. I know I could get them because they're on sale, but why do that if it's bad for me? I might have more money but I'll be less healthy, and to me that's always worth it. Secondly, I do not understand why those people have to have 2034238 boxes of EVERYTHING. Who in their right mind needs 3 crates of toothbrushes?? Yes, I saw one the other day with that. I know that in order to get it for completely free you need to buy multiple items because of something with how the coupons work, but really, do you have to have a small grocery store in your basement? People can use those supplies, you know, people that don't have anything? On a lot of episodes, however, many of the items are donated to charities, and those are always the best episodes to me. However, all of those women seem to have hours and hours of time on their hands to put these massive shopping lists together, and it's extremely strategic. They research sales, then collect tons of store coupons which they then combine with manufacturer coupons, and calculate how many they need to buy in order to get them for free. Not to mention the fact that they spend the majority of their time either dumpster diving for coupons or researching sites on the internet to find deals, and usually have to divide their lists into transactions for the store. I have neither the time nor the math skills to do any of this, so for now I think I'll just stick to using my Kroger card and using the random coupons I get in the mail. Any money I can save helps, even if I can't get a small grocery store for free!

Meal of Champions

The poor college student's concept of "living on a budget" should be more aptly phrased as "barely living." Granted, I don't anything to complain about and can make groceries last for a long time, but once the supplies start to diminish my meals are pretty pathetic. I'm not a huge fan of canned food like ravioli because I find it pretty disgusting, so I always buy perishable ingredients that can be versatile such as bread, tortillas, cheese, turkey slices, and eggs. By the time I pay all my bills I have little money left for groceries, so I am stuck with whatever I can find in my refrigerator. My dinner the other week consisted of a single tortilla with about 2 teaspoons of cheese, cooked in the pan of course so I can feel like I'm actually feeding myself. Instead of the usually present hot sauce, however, I had to resort to fire sauce packets from Taco Bell. Bon appetit.

What are we eating??

If you don't know what it is, you shouldn't eat it, right? If you think about this phrase it makes perfect sense - why would you put something into your body if you have no idea where it came from or what it does? However, I literally do not know a single person who abides by this rule, and in today's world it seems kind of impossible to do so. Everyone buys pre-packaged food at some point, and those are made with preservatives so they can be kept on the shelves for weeks at a time. Have you ever looked at the ingredients of Oreos, frozen pizza, Doritos, or thought about what exactly goes into hot dogs? Fast food is even worse to think about. I love Krystal and Taco Bell like any good American girl should, but I do not want to know where that beef comes from or how long those beans in my bean burrito have been sitting out. It's blissful ignorance, and there's no escaping it. Even if you bought nothing but organic vegetables, there is still no perfect guarantee that they have not been exposed to any pesticides or handled properly in their trip from the farm to the grocery store. It's a scary concept, the fact that we are a generation of chemically-altered fake food. I could go into a tangent and predict the zombie apocalypse due to radioactive hamburgers which will be the downfall of mankind, but I think Katt Williams explains the effects of chemicals in food and medicine better than I could. The whole video is hilarious and should be watched, but the section about food starts at 4:40. 

nom nom boredom

Food is used for much more than sustenance and nutritional value. It is the center of social gatherings, comfort, creativity, and not to mention the basis of any first date -- I mean who doesn't take a girl out to dinner? But I have a terrible habit -- I eat when I'm bored. When I have nothing else to do, all I think about is food and what salty delicious junk I could be consuming. Why can't I get bored and instead have the urge to go jogging, or clean my house, or work on that twenty page capstone I keep determinedly ignoring? The worst was when I worked at Schroeder's in Calhoun, which at certain times of the day got absolutely no business at all. With nothing to do and an entire kitchen full of ingredients, I found myself constantly craving nachos, cheesecake calzones, or my personal favorite, pesto pizza with jalapenos. The head managers were never there (like I said, there was nothing to do), so those in charge indulged in food as much as I did. Why sit around and do nothing when we could create a gigantic pile of nachos with every possibly topping and entirely too much cheese? I will say, perhaps partially for the sake of self-defense, that my habit has contributed to my creativity in the kitchen. Some of my best dishes have come from me being so bored that I walk into my kitchen and just start throwing things together until something delicious happens. However, most other times my habit causes me to start grabbing ready-made things out of the cabinet and stuffing my face until I find something productive to do.

javajavajavajavajava

Coffee is one of my favorite substances on the planet. I have had it almost every single morning since I was 15, which could possibly be bad for my health because of all the caffeine, but I need something to boost my energy and keep up my perky disposition when I have only had 3 hours of sleep the night before. However, it's strange how coffee also serves to calm me down when I've had a stressful day. When I want to sit back and relax, I often have a cup or two of coffee and can sometimes even fall asleep soon afterward. Maybe it's because I am comforted by the familiar taste and the feel of the warm mug in my hand like hot chocolate on a cold winter day. Or, more likely, it's because the caffeine stimulates my mind as well as my body and releases endorphins into my system. Some of my best writing and best conversations with friends have come from drinking coffee. For example, I have never worked so hard or had so much to talk about than last semester at Cups & Mugs. Maybe it was the soothing atmosphere and the comfort of being surrounded by friends who were struggling with the same classes as I was, or maybe it was because we all hadn't slept for 3 days and were hyped up like crack fiends. Either way, part of the reason I love coffee so much is for the good associations I have with it, and the inspiration it gives me when I write. I'm actually drinking coffee right now so I can write four assignments before I go into work in an hour.

Although my body has become used to the gratuitous amounts of caffeine I have filled it with for the past several years, sometimes my tolerance mysteriously disappears and I end up bouncing off the walls and talking incessantly until I finally crash like a semi-truck of Starbucks into a brick building. I basically end up something like this: 

Simplicity, Italian style.

I love simple ingredients and simple preparation, things you can just throw together with barely any preparation. One of my favorite snacks is a quintessential Italian salad known as caprese, which is sliced tomato, fresh mozzarella, fresh basil, and some salt and pepper. Cut them up, layer them, done. Nothing tastes fresher than basil straight out of the garden, and my mom grows basil in our back yard so it's always a special treat when I go home. Lately I've been trying to eat better, but it's difficult when I have less than ten minutes between each class, and then at the end of the day I have ten minutes to get to the gym so the only option is fast food, making the two hours of hell I'm about to endure completely pointless. So tonight I used three of my favorite ingredients to make a pasta salad based on one by Ina Garten, aka the Barefoot Contessa. It has spiral pasta, diced tomatoes, cubed fresh mozzarella, chopped basil, black olives, and sun-dried tomatoes, then a dressing of olive oil, red wine vinegar, garlic, salt, and pepper (I added some Italian seasoning too - you can never go wrong with that stuff). Not only is it delicious, but hopefully it will stop me from resorting to McDonald's or Cheetos to get me through the day.

Jalapenos and Bacon

The other night I experimented with two of the most delicious and painful-to-prepare ingredients: jalapenos and bacon. I decided to host a game night at my apartment for the Georgia game, which I soon gave up on, and make jalapenos stuffed with a mixture of cream cheese, cheddar cheese, and bacon. The jalapenos were extremely fresh as they were picked earlier that day from my mom's garden, and therefore very...potent. First I had to cut the peppers in half and seed them, and since my pairing knife was in use I abandoned all use of logic and seeded them by digging out the insides with my thumbnails. At first everything was fine and I continued to cook in blissful ignorance, at least being careful not to get my hands near my eyes. But then...the burning started. Imagine paper cuts underneath your finger nails, then set those paper cuts on fire - I was still feeling it 24 hours later! As to the other painfully delicious food, anyone who has ever cooked bacon knows there is a definite risk to frying it. In order to fry it, the pan has to get hotter, which produces more grease, which makes the bacon shoot HOT FIERY OIL AT YOU. So not only my hands burning, but now my arms and pants are covered in splatters of hot bacon grease AND Georgia lost the game.

On a good note, the jalapeno poppers were delicious!

Fajitas and Procrastination

Now that I have an apartment of my own, I realize how much my mom really cooked. Even if it was leftovers, there was always something in the fridge to eat. Earlier today, I looked in our refrigerator to find leftover pizza from two weeks ago, half a block of cheese, and some jalapenos from my mom's garden. I have a hungry boyfriend to feed, so I had to think of something. With a kitchen of my own I now feel like I should be morphing into some sort of culinary mastermind, but for college students anything above the cooking difficulty of ramen noodles should be considered impressive. Tonight I made some of my favorite fajitas.The marinade for the chicken requires a good bit of different seasonings, and I also got bell peppers and onions to saute. First I combined all the seasoning, which includes chili powder, oregano, paprika, garlic powder, cumin, red pepper flakes, lemon, and oil, and mixed it with the raw chicken strips. I then set it in the fridge for about an hour and a half.
While the chicken set in the marinade I started doing laundry, making iced tea, and cleaning the entire kitchen. But why go through so much trouble? Why did every dish have to be cleaned right then? I've thought about it and figured it out - it was because I had homework to do, and nothing makes me accomplish trivial things like procrastination of school. If I have homework to do, I will cook a delicious and complex meal (excluding the fajitas, but come on, I made the marinade) and clean my entire house. With the thought of 7 reading assignments in the back of my mind, I cleaned all the dishes, did two loads of laundry, watched an episode of South Park, and almost broke the washing machine. But most importantly, the fajitas were delicious. The marinade is mildly spicy and the peppers and onions give the fajitas a crunchy texture inside the soft tortillas - and of course, I coat mine entirely in hot salsa. Afterwards I of course cleaned up the whole kitchen because I still had reading assignments to do, but I think it was worth the meal.