I had an especially light-colored order of sam noom from Pad Thai Café today. I’m not really sure what goes into the pan that affects the color, but I guess they were a little sparing with it today. I tried to look up what exactly causes the traditional shade of brown, but unfortunately most of the texts I uncovered, once translated from the original Thai, were less about the recipe and more about Noom himself. It all seemed pretty complimentary, from what I could understand.

I was sitting in over at the New England Art Institute career fair today where they were kind enough to provide little rolled up deli sandwiches. You know, the catered type that are like 3-4 inches long and laid out in varied flavors. I had one that was chicken salad, and a bit of another that I think was turkey. While I’m a fan of this genre of sandwich, it didn’t turn out to be quite enough to fill the surging urge I had for a real substantial stomach full of food. So when I got back to the office, I marched right over to Cherry Mart and grabbed a seaweed salad and one of those triangles of rice with a tuna topping. Despite its heritage, the tuna in those things isn’t sushi grade or anything; it’s straight from the canfish.

I ended up at the Qdoba in the food court again today while I waited for the guys at GameStop to unpack their shipment of Left 4 Dead. It was a little less eventful than the typical mall/zombie combo generally seems to be, but as I was pretty hungry and decidedly more so for chicken taco salad and less so for brains, it all worked out pretty well.

There was something sour about one of the pickles in my chicken shwarma salad today. Usually Café Jaffa has pretty excellent pickles, but I think this time around a stray shitpickle made its way into the batch. It might not have even been an entire pickle that was tasting poorly. Could have just been a particularly unfortunate region of a single pickle. But those few scattered bites that brought my face down into a bundle were really tough to get through. So you see, it’s not just the bad apple we have to be mindfull of; it’s the bad pickles too.

Another exciting friday lunch! As part of a market research endeavor he’s helping out with, Gatti ended up with a gift certificate to Boston Market that he was kind enough to share with us all. I’m not sure I ever bothered to imagine what $50 worth of food from that place might look like, but it adds up to being one hell of a feast. We had chicken, meat loaf, corn, mashed potatoes, corn bread, stuffing, and some sort of sweet potato casserole that basically tasted like brown sugar in paste form. But in a good way. I tried a little bit of everything. It was definitely a delicious meal, and I think it might have even turned a few naysayers around on the notion of Boston Market in general.

And then Pfeffer washed his hands in the leftover gravy. No one knows why, but I doubt anyone asked.

A mild miscommunication lead to a new taste sensation today. McD was kind enough to bring me back a Phat Chick from UBurger. However, he misheard my additional onion rings as onions for the sandwich, which they serve up in sort of a caramelized state over there. The end result was quite delicious, and it made me start to wonder what else I could stick on there. I have a feeling that mushrooms might be the way to go next.

After the holiday and a day off to play Fallout, I had a fair amount of catching up to do today. The downside was that this kept me from running out for lunch, but the plus side was that Kenji brought me back an incredibly tasty sausage and pepper sub from Bostone. It’s nothing fancy, but it really hit the spot today. I added in some garlic chili sauce for a little extra kick, but the sausage they use over there’s got some spice to it as it is. I confess to breaking a sweat about 3/4 of the way through.