Ladies' lunch...or snack

Excuse the absence, dear readers, H is home all week before he begins his new job on Monday. While it has been enjoyable, with many fun coffee trips while the kids are at school, it has also produced some friction since he is in vacation mode and is in that mode in my office. Nothing is more annoying than needing to jump on the desktop to retrieve a file for Girl Scouts and he’s on there looking up flat screen televisions, asking my why I need the computer at that particular moment and can’t I use the laptop. I don’t come to his office, troll Zappos and leaving dirty laundry, empty coffee cups and soda cans everywhere, now do I?

Anyway, one of the fun things we got to do this week was go to Bobby Flay’s Burger Palace for lunch after paying the usual $200 fine to get out of Target after only having gone in to buy detergent. The BF's Burger Palace offers an amazing array of burgers, with all different toppings, and the menu even includes a bread-less option where the patty is served over a lovely salad (called “topless”, which, eeww) . This is my usual choice so I have room to gorge myself on sweet potato fries. H scoffs every time, to which I reply, “One of us fits in her pants from college, and you?”, but this time he also made the observation that no man would ever order a burger on top of salad.

This led to whole discussion of foods that, men, in general, do not consume with any great regularity. Yes, I know there are exceptions, spare me the hate mail. I thought you might like to see the three we came up while stuffing our faces with ground beef.

Chicken salad – This dish is essentially leftovers, but women really seem to dig it. We also seem to love it with tons of crap mixed into it – grapes, apples, nuts. Is this trail mix or a sandwich? At first I thought it was a mayonnaise-based salad aversion men have, but I know plenty of guys who love tuna salad. H has even had a tuna sandwich with bacon on it (thanks for introducing him to that little gem, V). I think there’s some kind of law that you can’t have a bridal luncheon or baby shower without chicken salad, or a gift made of diapers in some clever formation.

Yogurt – This food sort of qualifies since little boys will actually eat the stuff. As evidenced by what’s available in the grocery store, the more violently colored, the better. Skateboards also feature prominently in the Get Boys to Eat Yogurt Campaign. However, it seems once boys hit double digits, their consumption of this spoiled milk product plummets. Women, on the other hand, can’t get enough.

If you watch “women’s” television, meaning network between the hours of ten and four o’clock, or anytime hour on WeTV, TLC or Style, you will be assaulted repeatedly by images of ladies lapping up all varieties of this dairy treat. Greek, low-calorie, “digestive health”, you name your need, and there’s a yogurt for you. The curious thing is, with the exception of Greek yogurt, most yogurt products are trying to disguise what it is you are actually eating. Flavors like Boston Crème Pie and Strawberry Shortcake are supposed to make us feel just as satisfied eating ninety calories of aspartame-sweetened goop as eating the real thing. H could not stand the Yoplait ads featuring a certain pixie-ish looking woman and her African American friends exclaiming over their yogurt that was “weekend in the Bahamas” good. It’s not a life-altering experience, it’s low-calorie dairy you eat to strengthen your bones and maybe lose some lb’s, calm down.

Muffins – Muffins had their heyday in the 90’s, before we all started to fear carbs. As long as they were low-fat, it was perfectly reasonable to eat, what was essentially, cake, for breakfast or a snack.

Back in our college days, H and I would stagger up to the student co-op for breakfast where he would order a bacon, egg and cheese sandwich, and I, trying to shed some of my freshman fifteen, would sanctimoniously order a chocolate chip muffin. Sounds pretty harmless, unless you know what this muffin looked like.

Roughly the size of a volleyball, the “Coop Muffins” were a staple at my upstate New York university. I think it morally reprehensible that an institution my parents were paying to educate me and act in loco parentis made readily available carbohydrates of such gigantic proportions in a climate where it snowed roughly six months out of the year, and 50% of its female population was hungover at any given time. Is it any wonder I, as a childless eighteen year-old, found myself with stretch marks on my thighs at the end of fall semester?

Still unaware of the caloric carnage I was participating in, I continued to think my choice the superior one when H and I went out for breakfast for the next fifteen years. Then one day, I figured out the 500 calories, mostly protein, in his breakfast sandwich, that would keep him full until lunch, was nothing in comparison to the 800 I was consuming in empty carbohydrates, which would leave me ravenous ninety minutes later. Women today still participate in this sadly deluded nutritional dance, thinking foods like eggs and cheese the devil. Maybe if what you ate had some protein and fat in it, you wouldn’t need that yogurt at ten-thirty.

Given enough time, H and I will come up with a longer list, possibly including beverages (like Zima) or maybe even a list of foods women will not eat, like pork rinds, Campbell’s Chunky Soup and scrapple. Let’s take notice, shall we, that the list of foods women won’t eat are one that would, you know, kill you, or look like they are half digested. I’m just sayin’….