Cassi Creek: When in
doubt, dine out. At least, make an
effort to do so.
Our primary
choice is closed in order to host graduation dinner. Our fall back, a new “diner,” has a menu that
requires a microscope in order read it online.
Both of those restaurants are 18 miles northeast of our door. To the west, it is 16 miles to the nearest
restaurant of any caliber. Only our
first choice has some alternative foods.
That only happens because their ethnic cuisine uses them.
Compounding
the situation is the necessity of finding a place to eat that doesn’t use a
deep fryer as its primary means of food production, and that doesn’t use
potatoes as the meal’s base. It often
becomes a struggle to find something that won’t spike the diner’s glucose like
a Saturn V reaching for the moon. There is
a major omission in most commercial menus for deserts that diabetics can safely
eat. It would be a simple matter to keep
some sugar-free ice cream, some nuts, and some berries on hand to pad out the dessert
menu. There are millions of Americans
with diabetes. Yet almost no restaurants
bother to consider them when building menus.
Diabetes
complicates everything about the lives of people afflicted with it. Something as simple as grocery shopping can
become a futile search for anything beyond a narrow list of foods. Buying anything prepared requires looking
closely at the contents label. Sugars of
all manners hide in most prepared foods.
I brought home a half rack of ribs last night. They were rotisserie cooked with only a dry
rub. I looked at the label; the deli-counter
employee looked at the label. We both
failed to see sugar hidden in the rub even though we searched carefully. It’s that easy to screw things up.
