Mediocrity

I've been thinking about mediocrity lately. Specifically, about restaurant food (Don't you think that the vowel sound in the last two paragraphs in "restaurant" seem backwards considering how it's pronounced? Restaraunt would make so much more sense. More mediocrity).

I happen to be married to a man who often likes to cook and is quite good at it. This is wonderful and something I'm thankful for. But experiencing good food on a regular basis has made me aware that the majority of the items in the majority of restaurants either lack any originality, or are of low quality, or both.

Examples:
1. I am disappointed every time I order pancakes. It always tastes like a package mix. I know what pancakes taste like made from scratch (heavenly) and I know what color they are inside (not yellow). The last time I had breakfast, on our trip to Saskatchewan, and we had to eat out for breakfast I specifically asked if they were made from scratch, and was told yes. The sorry, flat, chemical-tasting things that arrived on my plate did not agree with that assessment.

2. What's with the whole whipped topping thing? Whipped cream is natural, it does not contain the type of trans fats that things like Cool Whip does, and it tastes 10x better. It takes no time to whip it up if you have the right equipment. So why do restaurants put edible oil products on when they could be using the real thing?

3. Salad dressings that come out of a bottle. I can buy a bottle. I go to a restaurant to have something extra.

4. Soups served out of a can, or worse, out of an envelope. That was the case when I had the minestrone at the restaurant here in Winnipeg in which my server was actually Nia Vardalos's sister. Wouldn't you think that after Vardalos wrote and starred in a screenplay, based on her own family, in which the whole of the extended family were fantastic cooks, that it would be a reasonable assumption that the Vardalos family would actually make the soup by doing things like, say, chopping up vegetables, rather than ripping open a packet of Knox?

But nothing is about quality anymore, it's all about marketing.

Now 'scuse me while I go yell at some kids on my lawn.