The Hungry Squid

Today, I read an article about "McWeddings" - apparently McDonald's  restaurants in Hong Kong have started to offer wedding catering and reception venues for up to 50 people(http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/foodwine/2014359941_mcweddings01.html) . For about $1300, you will get a "cake" made of McDonald's apple pies, a full McMeal, wedding invitations and even gifts for guests - what a deal!! Who can resist the aroma of burgers and fries as you revolve slowly to your first dance as husband and wife? I can't. Future husband, beware. As a child, one of my favourite foods was chicken fingers. I could eat them any time, literally, a dangerous obsession for a baby that looked like a potato. As an adult (if you can call me that), I still love chicken fingers - BUT, in a quest to be more healthy, I've been trying to make them at home, sans deep frying and with real, all-white meat chicken breast (just like McDonald's uses, of course). This past wee...

Sometimes, I wonder what makes take-out food so delicious. It's not nutritious. The ingredients are  sub-par, and often not well matched to the dish. The dishes themselves are not well-made, overly greasy and far too salty. And yet...we keep going back. Regardless of the barrage of ad campaigns extolling the virtues of organic, fair-trade, non-GM, 100, locally grown etc etc, in the dead of night, alone in our apartments, we will inevitably call Super Express pizza. So last week, in my quest to find something, anything, to save me from writing my grant proposal, I stopped myself from ordering take-out and instead, sought to make a take-out style dish at home. It seems that the key to delicious take-out is a) deep-frying and b) drowning the dish in grease; however, I discovered that this was not the case. This dish was delicious served with white rice and a salad with cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, parmesan and a honey-mustard vinaigrette (courtesy of the culinarily-inclined V...