Foodstuffs

It was one of the best soups I’ve ever eaten.  They called it Tomato and Basil but that name belied its chief ingredient: garlic.  What is up with restaurants hiding a main ingredient from consumers?  As I enjoyed the soup, I marveled at the texture of the some of the tomatoes in it.  “How do they get them to stay so firm?”, I thought.  It wasn’t until I came home and repelled my husband with my paint-peeling vapours that I learned the answer.  That wasn’t tomato.  It was cloves of garlic!  The garlic was so overwhelming that I didn’t even notice it was as if I had bathed my mouth in a garlic bath until I brushed my teeth and the powerful taste resumed its rightful place on my tongue.

Molly Blooms is a wonderful Irish pub on the ground floor in Free-FM’s building that we frequent for lunch. Apparently it’s a hot-spot during party nights on Richmond Row, too.  They’re friendly and the food is always good and it’s cheap.  During the day it attracts a business crowd from up and down the city’s core.  And apparently it doesn’t think anything of hiding its garlic stew under the guise of a regular soup, sending those poor suited chaps back out into their client meetings and presentations in a cloud of scent that could fell a moose at 100 paces.

Really, the garlic ought to be declared when they mention the soup, don’t you think?

Last night we grabbed dinner in the restaurant at the Slots at Western Fair District before taking in VIP night at the brand new Yuk Yuk’s on the second floor. (Great show! Headliner was Glen Foster – he’s hilarious.)  We’ve been to the restaurant many times and it’s got a varied menu and the food is always tasty.  I settled on a Thai vegetable stir fry but couldn’t decide on rice or rice noodles.  That’s what the menu said my choices were.  “What kind of rice comes with it?” I asked our server.  “It’s a white rice mixed with onions.”  Had I not asked, I would have received a rice and onion medley which would have made me, a person who is not an onion lover except in under strict conditions (low lighting, soft music) very unhappy.   So why not say the choice is rice and onions or rice noodles?  Are onions invisible to the food-making industry?  Do they not believe they deserve a declaration? Is it possible that the next time I order a yogurt and granola parfait, it could arrive with undeclared onions? These are the things I wonder.

I study menus carefully and take their comments seriously.  I look for things like green peppers (hate ’em) and avocado (love it) and fool that I am, I expect them to stay true to what they’ve put in print. One day a wrap arrived with about 50% green pepper.  You would have had to put a gun to my head to get me to eat it and even then, depending on the day, I might say, “Just shoot me”.  I asked the server about it.  “It didn’t list green peppers in the ingredients.”  “Oh”, she said flippantly, “Sometimes he just puts them in.”  Yeah, well honey, that’s a problem.  You don’t “just put in” something when you bother to alphabetize your ingredients list.  Back to the kitchen the wrap went.

With all of the worries about food allergies these days, I would think that sticking to what you say you’ll put on a plate is more important than ever.  So if you ever find yourself at Molly Blooms, try the soup.  It’s delicious.  But make sure your breath can take the rest of the day off.