New Toys, Great Food

Worship the iPod! Is it not nifty? I just bought myself a 30 Gig iPod with Color Video today, in beautiful black. i also was the recipient of the wonderful gift of a used Digital Camera, a Fujifilm FinePix 2650, though sans cables and memory card, which I had to pick up at Radio Shack.

I got myself a good one, 512 MB of Memory, which should hold about 200 or so pictures. I couldn't find any cables that would fit my camera, so I'll have to look in other places. But hey, that's two great toys in one splendiferous day. And then, to top it all off, I ate out and picked up 6 totally delicious corn muffins at my current favorite restaurant, Perkins!

Perkins became my new favorite place to eat after the Library I work for ate our Holiday Breakfast there. See, when I first started working, we had the Holiday Breakfast at a Holiday Inn in Toms River, the nearest large town. The food there sucked. It was all the worst of Institutional Food could offer: greasy sausages, limp, greasy bacon, vats of scrambled eggs (which I know, from working in food service myself once upon a time, are precooked, packed in plastic bags and rewarmed in massive vats of boiling water... reminiscent of some mad food scientist's lab), and cold, usually just on this edge of burnt toast, plus home fries. I call this LCD (for "Lowest Common Denominator" food.) I always ended up feeling sick to my stomach after the breakfast, so after the first one, I skipped it.

The year before last, they could no longer hold the breakfast in the Holiday Inn, because we had outgrown the facilities. Even the year I went, we were packed in like Sardines in a too-small can. So, they moved the Breakfast to a Place called the Chateau Grand out in Lakewood.

I liked the Chateau Grand even less. We had slightly more space, but the food was horrendous. The only bright spot being that they made omelettes on demand, but with the drawback that the lines for the omelettes were out the door and down the length of the function room. Since I don't eat omelettes, I was left completely unmoved by the food, which was actually worse than that of the Holiday Inn. And, to top it all off, it was an hour and a half journey just to get there, and usually a two-hour journey back from Lakewood (damned traffic!).

This last year, on the day of the Holiday Breakfast, the forecast was for freezing rain and massive black ice, so the Breakfast was cancelled the day before, and was to be rescheduled at a later time. It was pushed forward to this January, which meant that the Chateau Grand, which was going out of business at the end of December, couldn't do the breakfast.

Instead, they went to the Holiday Inn in my hometown, which has as its Restaurant, Perkins. This is a nice Holiday Inn, which just opened in August of last year, and everything in it is new and clean. Best of all, it's only a 10 minute drive from my house! Needless to say, this was a major improvement.

This year's breakfast was the best we have ever had. While it was mostly dishes I had experienced as LCD food (Scrambled Eggs, sausages, bacon, and hash browns), it also included mini muffins that were among the best I had ever tasted, and flaky mini-croissants that were just to die for. They also had really nice fresh fruit, but since our supervisor likes to sit by the walls, we were among the last tables to eat, and so the fruit was all but gone by the time I got there. ::Fume.:: The only real disappointment, besides the fruit, was that the juice was all from bottles, and super-sugary besides (33 sugars per 8 oz. glass? Yeek! That was the cranberry juice... the orange juice had 28 sugars per 8 oz glass... just as bad!)

Anyhow, when I saw that Perkins sold the exact same mini muffins (as well as regular size muffins), I had to get some. Ever since that, I have been addicted! I suggested it as a place to eat for my mom and dad when we went out for Valentine's Day, and I fell in love with the mashed potatoes and baby carrots there as well. That's good food in that thar restaurant!