"Just how many ways can you cook chicken?" asked my husband as we sat down for some fine dining in a little town near Jackson, Mississippi this week. We were on the last leg of our 25th wedding anniversary trip. Having had absolutely amazing times in Memphis, TN and Gulf Shores, AL, we were winding down with a brief stay in Jackson for some shopping and rest before returning home to real life. While in Gulf Shores we opted to eat in every meal. The sweet little condo we had rented had everything we needed to prepare our meals and we could dine in leisure. It was such a change, cooking for just the two of us. Hubby has never been one to complain about what we ate and I found it an absolute pleasure cooking for him like in the 'olden days', before kids.
Now here we were, eating out. Fine dining. Well not really. It was a buffet and recommended by the nice lady at the front desk of our hotel. As we approached the restaurant we noticed that we were racial minorities. Not a problem. We are not racists in any way. But with current events that were being broadcast across every news channel and being in unfamiliar surroundings, it was definitely something you couldn't help but notice.
Getting out of our car and walking to the door, we saw a family getting into their vehicle right at the front door. A woman was helping an obviously very ill man into the van. As we got nearer I realized he was getting into the driver's seat, a fact that was very alarming because of his obvious multiple physical illnesses including a catheter hanging over the top of his pants. After giving him a last shove into the driver's seat, the woman assisting him quickly turned and almost plowed down my husband as she hurried back into the restaurant. "I dropped my toothpick!" she announced, as she hurried in for a replacement.
Once inside, I noticed the familiar smell of old, not so clean, eating establishments. The smell has always given me the impression that there is a lot of old grease hanging around and probably a rodent or two or twenty. But we were there and in line. The manager directed us to a completely empty dining area in the back. Again, we are not racist. But we could not help but feel like we were being ushered to the back of the bus. We later realized that the waiter assigned to that area had absolutely no customers and we were apparently bait for others to come sit in the back so he would have some customers.
Now this was a well known chain restaurant so I won't mention any names. But our local restaurant of the same name always has an amazing variety of food, very well cooked, labeled and delicious. We were tired and thought we could surely find something we could eat. I headed for the salad bar and hubby headed for the meats. I noticed, behind the salad bar, a display of produce that looked much like a grocery store display. It even included a huge cardboard box sitting in the middle of the work area and marked "watermelon" on the side.
We made our selections and sat down at our table, now being joined by another couple who chose to sit at the very next table behind my husband even though the room was completely open except for us. My salad was ok. Very little variety of salad items but it was ok. However, the fluffy rolls that we are used to were instead very hard, chewy rolls that very well may have been left over from previous days and would have never been served at our local family buffet. Hubby bit into a deviled egg and I asked him how it was. He said it wasn't as good as the ones I make. I thought he was just being nice until I tried one for myself. Oh my. It actually tasted like soap! I couldn't finish it.
Still attempting to find something edible, we made another round at the buffet. Hubby came back to the table and asked "Just how many ways can you cook chicken anyway?" Used to having chicken, beef, pork and fish to choose from, this place wasn't even close. On a subsequent buffet trip, hubby checked out the chicken. Baked, fried, some with barbecue sauce poured over it, Asian, on the bone, off the bone, in soup. Chicken enchiladas that were crispy on the ends and tasted freezer burned in the middle. You could just about name it chicken-wise and it was there.
And our waiter. Carl. Well Carl was not much on making eye contact. In fact, Carl wasn't much on watching anything. While I was perusing the buffet at one point, Carl came to our table and refilled our drinks, running mine over to the point that hubby had to grab napkins and clean up the table as Carl went on his merry way, oblivious to the fact that anything had even happened.
Still trying to find something edible, I began to notice things mislabeled. Rigatoni noodles labeled as spaghetti. Sauce that was labeled marinara had so much grease floating on top of it that it must have been a meat sauce of some kind (and I don't think this was chicken). Desserts.....well hubby really enjoyed the peanut butter cookies even though they were labeled as white chocolate chip cookies. I try to be careful to eat very little sugar so I looked for sugar free or low sugar desserts. Sugar free white cake was on the label but chocolate cake was underneath. I asked the lady behind the counter for help. She obviously thought I was really pathetic when I couldn't tell which cake was sugar free and even more so when the plate I picked up had something green growing on it so I handed it to her. She held it in her hand, not knowing what to do. Pretty sure she put it back on the display after wiping off the green substance.
Lima beans, cooked cabbage. Almost rock hard hush puppies (no fish to go with them unless you would consider the fake crab salad as fish.....it did have tartar sauce with it so maybe that was the intent). An overflowing sink right behind the salad bar. We laughed. And we laughed. And we are still laughing! Might as well. We were together. We were relaxed. And we made the best of an interesting situation. Oh.....and we didn't overeat.
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