The Problem With Eating Out

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to eat out, and it's not just because I'm a vegetarian, although that can present its own challenges. The problem I have is the contrast between the quality of the ingredients and the quality of recipes and preparation that we have at home - which is pretty high, although we do have our share of recipe failures - and the generally mediocre to poor quality of ingredients and preparation that we find in most sit-down restaurants.

An example - yesterday we went for a drive in the countryside and ended up in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. We had lunch at a randomly selected restaurant in the tourist area - it wasn't a chain restaurant. I had a grilled cheese sandwich. It wasn't even mediocre, it was lousy. The cheese clearly wasn't real cheese - it was gooey "processed cheese food" - and had no flavor to speak of. The tomato on the sandwich was tasteless (it is winter so I can excuse that) - the only spark of interest was the red onion on the sandwich. My husband's fries had clearly gone straight from the factory where they were pre-cut to the freezer to the deep fryer. The ice tea was clearly made from a mix.

I'd say that this was an aberration, but it really isn't. We increasingly find most sit-down restaurant food close to inedible - and that's without even considering the fast food places. Our best bets are ethnic restaurants, although that's not always a guarantee - there are plenty of appallingly bad Chinese restaurants - Middle Eastern, Indian, Thai and Japanese can do the trick. The more cooking at home we do with quality ingredients, the less acceptable most restaurant food has become. We've decided that from now on when we take a day trip, that we're going to pack a lunch or stop at a supermarket that has a salad bar and some decent fresh fruit.