Lunch in Colmar

Monday on the blog we were walking in France, tiring work, so let’s hop over to Colmar for a bit of lunch.  We ate at the same restaurant as the prior year, sitting outside by the river (Little Venice).  If you’d like to see a number of photos of places we saw and read a bit about them, click here (not my photos.)  It was hot, so we opted for salad and a glass of wine, while watching flat-bottomed boats filled with tourists pole by and swans glide past.

Colmar was part of France, then Germany, back to France, again to Germany, and finally ended up on the eastern edge of France.  Consequently, the architecture and food represent both cultures.  We opted for a lighter, more French lunch this visit.

This delicious, refreshing, filling, and beautifully presented salad had foie gras (front left), prosciutto (middle left), smoked salmon (hiding on the right), lots of beautifully cool, thinly-sliced veggies, and was topped with a crisp breadstick.  It was just what I needed before hitting the streets for photos of doors and other delights.  I would order it again in an instant!

French lunch

Salad with foie gras and duck breast

Veal chop with mushroom sauce

Profiteroles, choux pastry balls filled with ice cream, topped with dark chocolate and whipped cream

Preying–a haiku

Preying

Hawk floats lazily
Buoyed by updrafts, perusing
The day’s lunch specials

Lunch in Little Italy, something deer, and a pumpkin update

Friend time for a couple hours, so we rendezvoused in Cleveland’s Little Italy for an inexpensive but always tasty lunch at Presti’s, http://www.prestisbakery.com/.   We’d been blessed with rain, more threatening, so when I arrived first, I grabbed a table outside but under the overhang, protecting us from both too much sun and any possible showers.  What to have wasn’t a problem even for me, the one who usually lingers over a menu for ages, torn by all the choices.  We had our usual entree…

Practical beauty

I know you thought from the title that you were going to read and see pictures about me, but sorry to say, it ain’t so.  Alas.  But weep not.  I think you’ll enjoy what follows almost as much. 🙂

Flying cranes and gorgeous flowers

Home-cooked Japanese food isn’t found everywhere outside of Japan but today for lunch, we stopped by Flying Cranes on Larchmere and indulged.  The food was wonderful and the atmosphere completely relaxing.

Dinner and a show

Confession:  it was really lunch and a show, but both were excellent.

I think I’m turning Japanese

For us, no visit to Chicago longer than a few days is complete without a trip to Mitsuwa Marketplace in Arlington Heights, http://www.mitsuwa.com/tenpo/cica/eindex.html,  the enormous Japanese grocery store that on weekends seems to draw every Japanese person in the area (and from the surrounding states) to eat, buy Japanese books and magazines, and stock up on Japanese supplies of every kind.

Abusive moms and cereal killers!!!!

It’s Monday morning, time for your daughter to go to preschool. You jump out of bed, get dressed, wake your daughter (maybe twice) , fix breakfast, empty the dishwasher, fix lunch. Let’s see. What do you have for lunch? Even more importantly, what will she eat and not quietly toss in the garbage? Veggies are out, unless you keep an eagle eye on her, which you can’t do while she’s at school. Look in the fridge. Hmmm, how about a turkey and cheese sandwich? Not bad. You know your daughter will eat that. A banana…that’s good, healthy and, best of all, desirable! Add some chips,some apple juice and it’s time to go. Phew! One small step for mother-kind. Now off to the real work of the day. You feel good because your daughter has a nice, reasonably healthy lunch and you can shove those veggies down her throat tonight….er, I mean….watch her to make sure she eats them.

But wait!! You live in North Carolina and in NC today, the preschool lunch police are patrolling the lunch room. According to Matthew Boyle of “The Daily Caller”, http://dailycaller.com/2012/02/14/nanny-state-report-nc-school-officials-confiscate-preschoolers-homemade-lunch/, “That meal didn’t meet with approval from the government agent who was on site inspecting kids’ lunches that day.” Guess what? Your daughter’s lunch is busted and suddenly you’re not the next incarnation of Martha-Stewart-mom-edition. You’re a criminal!! Up against the lunch line! Now!

I know it’s hard to believe and it’s more difficult for me to maintain a light, sarcastic tone, when what I really want to do is rip this “government agent’s”  pencil and pad away and throw them out with the uneaten cafeteria veggies. Who in the world, and in his/her right mind, thinks government agents should be inspecting preschoolers lunches???????? Raise your hand; I dare you!! Oh, yeah, and don’t forget who’s paying these people. You and I, the criminal classes.

(Breathe in, breathe out. Wax on, wax off. OK. I’m under control.)

Matthew reports that, “The Department of Health and Human Services’ Division of Child Development and Early Education requires that all lunches served in pre-kindergarten programs must meet USDA guidelines. Meals, the guidelines say, must include one serving each of meat, milk and grain and two servings of fruit or vegetables. Those guidelines apply to home-packed lunches as well as cafeteria meals.”

A few questions/objections spring to mind. What if you’re vegetarian or vegan? What if your child hates vegetables or fruit? Is ketchup really considered a veggie? How about French fries? What if you send a salad with no milk or meat? What if you butt out of my business? (Sorry, that somehow just slipped out!) What if school lunches aren’t particularly healthful or appealing? What if kids throw out the “healthful” parts of that lunch? Oh…they do? Does it count that the kids just take the good food? Is the trash can getting healthier? Is the next step an inspector at each table to be sure each child actually eats all the food groups?

But it gets better! Her meal was so unhealthy that the government agent forced her to eat better-for-her-than-a-turkey-and-cheese-sandwich cafeteria chicken nuggets. I bet she felt much healthier after that!! I’d like to know what happened to the rest of her meal. Did they send it to China where all those starving children are who appreciate having the food you don’t want to eat?

And that really begs the question of which food group they thought she was missing and why chicken nuggets (even if they really are chicken) replaced it? Aren’t chicken nuggets protein and aren’t turkey and cheese both protein as well?

But wait! That’s not all. Although the mother didn’t order the school lunch now and get the free Ginsu knives and free shipping, she did get charged for the cafeteria chicken nuggets, about $1.25 or so, I think, from another report I heard. Talk about adding insult to injury. (I’ve just realized that there are way too many sentences in this blog that require exclamation points but if I put them all in, the whole thing would look like a Robert Ludlum book. In fact, it does have that sort of feel. Perhaps if Jason Bourne had been here, this wouldn’t have happened. Or perhaps the government agent would be dead, the preschool burned to the ground {or blown up}, but with minimal loss of young lives, and all the forces of the US government would be after Jason to force HIM to eat the cafeteria lunch, the better to make him tell all he knows. I’m pretty sure cafeteria chicken nugget would do the trick.)

Now I see there’s a “Man Charged For Allegedly Cooking And Eating Cats: Jason Louis Wilmert Arrested In California”, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/man-eats-cats_n_1281496.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec3_lnk1%26pLid%3D136412. While the article didn’t mention it, I wonder if they forced him to eat cafeteria chicken nuggets as well. Or did he only have to eat fruit and veggies, put the cat on some whole grains and drink his milk?

This isn’t the death of common sense. This is murder most foul and possibly (no, probably) the start of a nation-wide cereal killing spree.