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Johnny Fins

May 15th, 2009

About a week ago we visited a new restaurant called Johnny Fins. (Well, the restaurant itself isn’t new. It was just new to us.) A soon-to-expire twenty-five dollar off coupon drove us there.

If you’re not familiar with the area around Lake Travis in Austin, to get to anywhere around the lake (by car) you have to drive long, winding backroads—sometimes for what feels like an hour just to get a few miles.

The winding trip to Johnny Fins ended in a parking lot and no restaurant. “Hmmm… I think we came the right way. Oh wait, there it is.” The restaurant floats right out on the water and all we had to do to get there was walk down a four mile, thirty degree incline which convinced me no matter what I ate at the end of this, I needn’t worry since I’d easily work it off on the return trip.

We got there a little late and it wasn’t crowded. We sat at our table right by the parked boats. (Is that the right nautical term? “Parked?”) A guitar duo was playing. Loudly. But fortunately they went on break soon. Our server came up shortly after, wearing a dark turquoise tank top with “Hey, Up Here” written in bold, white lettering. We ordered soft drinks and asked for the obligatory “few more minutes” as we pondered our culinary choices.

The menu said, “Best Burgers in Austin.” Of course, every menu (what serves the burgers) in Austin says that. However, I was at the end of a pretty good week, weight-wise, and decided that even with the long climb back to the car, I would still “be good.” I ordered the chicken caesar salad. (Otherwise, you’d be reading the “Austin Burger Tour #5″ post today instead.)

And I was good. I didn’t sneak fries or chicken fingers off others’ plates. (And by that I don’t mean my daughters’ plates, but the couple two tables over.) And the caesar salad was actually pretty darn good.

About the only thing I could complain about was the return of the music. The music itself was okay but didn’t need to be that loud. (Did I just say that? Geez, maybe I am getting old. I’ll be kicking those kids off my lawn any day now.)

But I’d recommend it anyway. Especially if you love sharing your dinner with real, live ducks. Check them out here.

Posted in Pizza Night | 4 Comments »

In Defense of Fad Diets

May 14th, 2009

grapfruit.jpgYou know the routine by now. Flip the channel, open a magazine, or click a link and you’re confronted with yet another in-depth piece of journalism talking about how horrible fad diets are. “Don’t eat a diet solely of grapefruit for the rest of your life,” they wisely tell us. Um…okay. This is obvious, obvious stuff to most of us by now. They may as well start writing articles about how the sun will rise tomorrow or how the last Harry Potter book was a best-seller. Yawn.

I think what annoys me most is the way each article is written as if were delivered from the mountaintop on a stone tablet. “Hearken unto me, ye stupid masses: Eating nothing but pickles and Sweet-Tarts for six years is bad for your health.” Yes, thank you for that helpful bit of information. That never occurred to me.

On the other hand, most of us feel a bit smug reading these gems. We feel encouraged that we, and we alone, already knew that the Cheez-It and Lemon Juice diet was a bad idea. We would certainly never buy that snake oil. We’ve learned from years and years of experience that the only way to lose weight is through eating a nutritious, balanced diet and getting plenty of exercise. (Never mind very few of us has ever actually been able to employ this concept ourselves. At least we know what we’re supposed to do.)

But what exactly are “fad diets” designed to do? Easy answer: lose weight and lose it quickly. This is, of course, what the experts immediately pounce upon. “It’s unhealthy! It hasn’t been clinically proven to work! If you follow that diet then you won’t be buying my wonder diet book!”

They’re all good points when you take it from the primary point of view of long-term viability and effectiveness. They (rightly) claim that 700 calories a day is no way to live. Or that cutting out carbohydrates for seventy years is impossible. But last I checked, I don’t believe a single one of these programs actually recommends you follow the diet for seventy years.

If a diet promises a quick fix, and you’ve struggled with everything else, then why not try it for two or three days? Unless you’re actively ingesting poison, I don’t believe two or three days of anything is going to have any long term negative impact. You may just drop a few pounds. And, sure, it’s probably all water weight. But maybe that’s exactly what you need to get your butt in gear.

The detractors of fad diets make the exact same mistake the proponents of good diets make: they focus on the math and ignore the psychology. If you’re down in the dumps and feel like nothing will ever work for you, then go ahead and grab a crazy diet for half a week and see what happens. If that drops you from 212 to 209 you might just feel something you haven’t felt for a long, long time: happy. And, holy cow, if that was just enough to drop you from 202 back into Onederland, you might just go out and buy yourself a pony.

Just one word of warning. The experts are right. Don’t do this forever. Treat it for what it is: a kickstart program and go into it with a transition plan in hand. Your three days of fad dieting is more than enough time to stock up on good foods, buy a new pair of walking shoes, and purchase that doctor’s new wonder diet book.

Posted in No Help Here | 6 Comments »

Thirty Things

May 13th, 2009

Back in February and March, I took five of my Leftovers posts in a row to go through Twenty-Five Odd Facts and Figures You May or May Not Already Know About Me. Of course, no one has just twenty-five things about them and I found it difficult to narrow my life down to just that. So after much internal debate, I’ve decided to present Things 26 through 30 out of 25.

26. I have one tiny, minor, little OCD type quirk. When I’m at work in the kitchen and following a recipe, I have to go down the entire ingredient list again with each new ingredient. For example, if the recipe calls for: eggs, milk, bananas, chocolate chips, corn syrup, and Froot Loops, then I read it like this: eggs; eggs, milk; eggs, milk, bananas; eggs, milk, bananas, chocolate chips; and so on. I’d love to be able to finish one ingredient and move right on to the next. It would save me so much time.

27. I used to have a really great memory. Friends and fans alike never ran short of amazement at what my head could store. Everything from calendar dates to license plates, I was a regular Rain Man, with the one exception that I knew a new car costs more than a hundred dollars. But all that’s gone now and I’m definitely blaming years of Cheez-It overdosing.

Some time last year I decided to memorize pi out to as many places as I could manage. I made it to 107 places and that lasted a few weeks. Then I stopped thinking about it and it all went away again. I can now go this far without thinking: 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288. After that I pause a while and can then come up with 419716939937510 … then I’ll drop a few and eventually find my way back out to the 100th digit or so. I find it fascinating that there are holes in the sequence but then I can pick it right back up later on down the chain.

However, I’m sure most of you find this much less fascinating and have already moved on to #28, so I’ll just shut up now.

28. Someone once asked me, “If you could meet any person in the whole wide world, living or dead, real or fictional, for just an hour, who would it be?” I replied without hesitation: “Me … when I’m eighty years old.” I’d somehow have Future Charlie rent a time machine, travel back to now, bring me a copy of Grey’s Sports Almanac, and let me know all the stupid things to avoid between now and then. My biggest worry? Future Charlie asking me, “Why oh why did you spend so much time on that stupid blog?!”

29. I used to have a really great memory. Friends and fans alike never ran short of amazement at what my head could store. Everything from calendar dates to license plates, I was a regular Rain Man, with the one exception that I knew a new car costs more than a hundred dollars. But all that’s gone now and I’m definitely blaming years of Cheez-It overdosing.

30. Along with my memory, I’m also slowly losing my only other superpower: my ability to stay up late. And enjoy it. I remember a time when going to bed the same day I woke up was considered an extremely early turn-in. Now I greatly look forward to those evenings I turn in around 9:30. Before I know it I’ll be eating dinner at four in the afternoon and planning vacations to Branson, MO.

Well! Now that I’ve broken the Twenty-Five Count Barrier, who knows how far this string of posts could go? Forty things? Sixty things? Maybe even 107. We’ll see how many of you hang on that long!

Posted in Leftovers | 8 Comments »

Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup

May 12th, 2009

You probably know the song Love and Marriage by Frank Sinatra. In fact, there’s maybe even a fifty-fifty chance you know it without ever having seen Married: With Children. It’s a classic song, but in our house, it goes something like this:

Soup and sandwich
Soup and sandwich
Go together like … something witty that rhymes with soup and sandwich…
This I tell you, brother.
You can’t have one without the other.

Ignore the fact that I’ve yet to find a word that rhymes with sandwich. (I thought “orange” was bad enough.) Also ignore the fact that sometimes I pronounce it “thoup and thandwich” for reasons I won’t go into here. What’s important is that soup and sandwiches do go together like horses and carriages, especially if the soup is “tomato” and the sandwich is “grilled cheese.”

This isn’t something I particularly liked (or even tried for that matter) when I was a kid. So unlike most of my pizza and cheeseburger ramblings, this isn’t a taste combination I can claim to have loved my entire life. (There probably isn’t a kid alive who actually likes tomato soup, so this isn’t exactly an earth-shattering revelation.)

But this I tell you, brother, I’m sure glad I discovered it after getting all growed up. It really is one of natures perfect pairings.

The perfect sandwich uses American cheese. This fake stuff made out of I-don’t-know-what melts cleanly and uniformly, creating the perfect weld between two slices of white bread. The outsides of the bread should have been slathered in I Can’t Believe It’s Not Margarine and cooked quickly on a hot, non-stick pan.

The tomato soup should be of the Andy Warhol variety and prepared with milk instead of water. (Why water is even a rehydration option is beyond me.) Use a whisk to mix it and take care avoid burning. It heats up very quickly.

The proper eating technique is to dunk the sandwich into the tomato soup. You might find this extraordinarily similar to last week’s Toast and Hot Chocolate post. (And by now you’ve probably divined one of my most cherished eating paradigms.)

If you’ve tried this, you know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, set aside some time this Saturday. You won’t be sorry. In the meantime, I’m going to work on fixing the song.

Go together like a scratch and hand itch.
Go together like a ball and grand pitch.
Go together like a cut and planned stitch.
Go together like a boat and manned hitch.
Go together like a broom and tanned witch…

Hmmm… I’m getting there.

Posted in You Know What Sounds Good Right Now? | 19 Comments »

Day Off

May 11th, 2009

Takin’ a day off. Double the results next Monday!

Posted in Magical Mystery Tour | 2 Comments »

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