What I eat, apparently

Oh, the Chick-fil-a, it goes so fast.

Featured today are the salads made of the straggling remnants of chicken from the Cow Appreciation Day debacle of several day’s past. Let’s just say it was good while it lasted.

A box of 4 chicken strips is entirely suitable as well as wholesomely appropriate for festooning the garlands of an otherwise potentially bland salad…or two!

The first of the salads has Ken’s Steak House honey mustard dressing slopped all over it. This is the only honey mustard, in dressing form or honey mustard form really, that you will ever need.

I have a hell of a time finding good salad dressing. Most of it downright sucks. Or it is too tangy. Or too oily. Or too bland. All of which are attributes of ’suck’, come to think of it.

Here is a Venn diagram I have made especially to illustrate this problem:

Mind, you there is a bit of a gap between ’suck’ and ‘not suck’ where many dressings surely lie. There are many dressings I have yet to try, and will probably never try, to save myself from the crushing possibility that with each new dressing I try, and promptly reject, the ’suck’ circle will only expand.

It should be noted, however, that this rule does not seem to apply to restaurant dressings. More often then not, they are comprised of not suck. Maybe my refrigerator has a spoiling effect on dressings, maybe they slip downers into my appetizers at these so-called ‘restaurants’, who knows really?

I don’t give up, though. Oh no. When the going gets tough, the tough seek alternatives.

This baby is seasoned (and quite delightfully, I might add) with pineapple juice, barbecue sauce, and chipotle sauce. Worked much better that I might have expected. I recommend it to all.

I will do many things for free food. I am also always interested in a good excuse to dress up and look ridiculous. Therefore, Cow Appreciation Day, a.k.a. the day all Chick-fil-a locations give a free combo meal to anyone who dresses up like a cow, was right up my alley. If you at least wore a cow related item, like a cow print hat, you’d get a free entree, but as far as I was concerned, that was for the wusses who couldn’t handle being a real cow (err real person-dressed-as-cow).

The cow regalia in full, along with an obviously much better dressed cow:

Now, the best way to go about this day is to figure out how to hit as many Chick-fil-a restaurants as possible. Unfortunately, this idea did not strike me and Christine, my partner in crime for the night, until about 6:30 pm. So we ended up hitting 5 of them. There was an elusive duo of guys dressed as cows who’d come down from Baltimore, according to rumor at least, and were in the process of going to 30 Chick-fil-as. That’s a serious commitment right there. We never managed to run into them, though, just passing rumors.

And there seems to be a strategy to doing this. First off, after the first meal that wasn’t designed to be eaten that night, I stopped getting any combo that came with lettuce and tomato, as both would surely get wilted and shriveled by the next day. Also, no more sodas. Bottled water was is the way to go. The real problem was the fries. Fries just don’t last well as leftovers. The sides that you don’t have to pay extra for (cole slaw, or carrot and raisin salad) just don’t do much for me. Sadly it never occurred to me until after it all that the $.25 extra to get a fruit cup side might have been covered in the ‘free combo’ price. I’ll have to remember that for next year, as fruit cups can go a long way.

I ended up with about 80% of both of our waffle fries, I compiled them all into this conveniently large container:

All in all, it was quite fun to hit all of those restaurants, next year I may even take the day off just to try to hit as many as I can, for there are few things better in this world then free chicken.