Tag Archives: food

D Is For Dine With Me

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Today is the 4th day of the  The A to Z Blogging Challenge,  which requires you to publish an article for every day in April except for the 4 Sundays, with each article being related to the appropriate letter of the alphabet.

With it being the fourth article in this series of 26, today’s letter is D, and seeing as how I am feeling a little peckish, I thought you might like to come Dine With Me.

I love food, and it doesn’t matter whether I am eating in or eating out, I love them both.

With money being fairly tight these days, the same as with many of us, eating out is becoming more and more a luxury that we are able to afford maybe once a month, if that.

Debbie and I do enjoy fine dining once in a while, but both of us were brought up on good old style English Cooking, and that is what we still love to eat, although we do cook a lot of other things as well.

Breakfast is one meal that I really do enjoy, although most of the time I keep it pretty simple.  I love once in a while to go to a good buffet restaurant like Golden Corral where I can enjoy anything and everything that I feel like eating, although it’s not a good idea to do this too often of course.

A while back I created a lens on Squidoo entitled What’s Your Favorite Breakfast Food and this has a lot of different types of breakfast foods listed.

Having lived in the USA for 15 years, I wanted to write something about how different eating out is in the USA as compared to the UK, with food being often a lot cheaper in the USA as well as there being a lot more choice of places to eat.

I published several articles about buffet restaurants, The Buffet Restaurant In The USA and The Buffet Restaurant In The UK, as well as Sweet Tomatoes A Healthy Buffet Restaurant Alternative.

Although I do love buffets, I love healthy food as well, and Sweet Tomatoes is one of the places that Debbie and I love to go to when we are in Florida.  Their Soup and Salad Bar and other fresh items are to die for.  Well, if you enjoy soup and salad that is.

Buffet Restaurants are also great places to go if you have small children or babies, which led to my publishing articles on Buffet Restaurants Perfect For Couples With Babies and Buffet Restaurants Ideal For Toddlers And Older Children.

But getting back to reality, and the lack of money, and once a week we usually end up eating what has become a staple English meal over the years, Baked Beans On Toast.   Baked Beans have a completely different use in the UK to in the USA, and here you can serve them on toast for any meal of the day, making a quick and also cheap meal.

Cheese On Toast is also one of my favorites, and again in England we eat this for any meal, quite often with Baked Beans smothered over it.  I tell you, this can’t be beat, and it kept me going through my university days.

I hope you enjoyed learning about my taste in food, and also had a chance to visit some of my food related articles.  I would love to hear any comments that you have on both my taste in food as well as your favorite kinds of food.

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Healthy Lunch Options For Work – Any Suggestions?

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packed_lunch_ideasI try to eat healthily these days, and am always looking for healthy lunch options that I can eat in the office when I am working.

While working in the USA for the past few years, the companies I worked for all had microwaves and fridges so employees could bring their own food in to the office and cook/re-heat it if desired.

Now that I have a new job in the UK, the company does have a fridge for the employees, but there are no cooking facilities, other than hot water for tea, coffee or cup-a-soup etc.

The company does have a subsidised staff canteen that provides full meals, but since Debbie and I usually eat together at night, I don’t really want to have two full meals in a day, however with winter approaching in England it does get chilly, and I will need something filling and warming inside me to help me get through the day.   The question is what?

Aside from the staff canteen serving full meals, I still don’t have much money, so I want to spend as little as I can on lunch, however I do want to eat healthy, and not fill up every day on anything that has a high fat or sodium content (like cup-a-soups).

I was wondering if anyone had any good ideas for something healthy to bring in to eat.   Obviously leftovers that I have to re-heat are out of the question, since I have no way of heating them up.   Bare in mind too that while a salad is ok in the summer, it’s not necessarily enough to warm you through on a chilly day.   Also, I don’t really want to spend ages preparing anything in the morning before I leave for work, but I don’t also want to make something like a sandwich the night before, and find it stale or soggy by the time I come to eat it.

For breakfast in the USA I was having Oatmeal (Porridge) most days, with either Applesauce or Honey on it.  This was really low in fat and sodium, good for the cholosterol levels, and also filling and warming.  Since I can’t cook Oatmeal here at work (no microwave), I am bringing in Muesli, since we do have a fridge, and that is filling for breakfast.  But what about lunch?

So do you have any ideas for a filling nutritious lunch that might help me out?   If so, please leave a comment on this post and let me know.    Thanks in advance for any help.