Peanut butter and 'belly
I decided to try Fresh Choice today, which is a "healthier" place in the building. A large chili there costs about the same as a large soup at Ponte Fresco - which is to say, more than I'd usually want to pay for soup, and I doubt I'll feel a need to do it again, but the comparison was interesting. Fresh Choice's beef chili is distinctly different from Ponte Fresco's - for one thing, it's spicy (I needed to mop up the top of my head after eating it), but it also takes a bit of a different approach to the production. The broth is much thinner but the ground beef is more pervasive, so you don't really notice. There wasn't too much going on in the way of other ingredients; just a minor amount of beans, peppers and onions for variety. The flavor wasn't as strong, though; though I do sometimes enjoy spicy foods, I never really like when spice is used in lieu of flavor. (The chicken vindaloo at Peacock in Vernon Hills is possibly the spiciest thing I've ever eaten, aside from Sean Horan's Couran Cove stir-fry, but it's great because there's also a lot of other flavor hiding under the burn.) That's not totally the case here, but the taste isn't really full-bodied. It could certainly be better. I don't know if that's due to it being more healthful, but that's not my fault. Still cost me six bucks.
Fresh Choice Spicy Beef Chili: 7/10Potbelly's "Big Jack's PB+J" is kind of a ripoff because it costs as much as any other Potbelly sandwich ($4.19 plus tax), despite a conspicuous lack of meat. I made the slight mistake of taking mine home on the bus before eating it, so by the time I got to it the peanut butter had largely melted up and my first bite resulted in a sizable puddle on the butcher paper. It was fairly tasty, though the peanut butter overwhelms the grape jelly, and a warm peanut butter sandwich isn't a bad idea. But a peanut butter sandwich is something I can make myself in two minutes, so it's hardly worth the expense.
Potbelly Big Jack's PB+J: 6.5/10
Chili today and hot tamale
When I first got to Burrito Beach today, with the intention of getting a chicken quesadilla, I had the distinct feeling I was being ripped off - the Beach charges the same amount for a quesadilla as it does for a burrito, and a burrito seems like a lot more food. But actually, once you factor in the side of rice (or chips, but I got rice), about the only thing the quesadilla is lacking is beans. So it's not really that big a deal, though when I'm eating out twice I'd rather not be spending $4.99 plus tax on one of the trips. In the future I'll probably try to bring a peanut butter sandwich or something from home so I only have to go with one small meal out a day; I tried bringing full lunches from home for a while, but it took too much time to make turkey sandwiches in the morning and I just couldn't make them the night before. A simple peanut butter sandwich, especially if I eschew jelly, would keep much better overnight.
I'm rambling a bit. At any rate, the quesadilla was pretty good. I used to get quesadillas at Taco Bell in college, but there's not much comparison - the chicken is better and Taco Bell never had peppers and onions like the quesadilla I got, which add some nice flavor. I might have liked the cheddar to be a little sharper, but otherwise I have minimal complaint.
Burrito Beach Cheddar Chicken Quesadilla: 7/10Because I liked it, and so I could get a review down, I went back to Ponte Fresco for the chili I'd had a few days back. I got a little cheddar cheese on it, and they actually put the cheese on and then topped it off, resulting in a nice cheddar payload at the center of the cup pretty much all the way down to the bottom. The chili itself was as good as I remembered - lots of beef and kidney beans, plus a tangy broth with the right thickness. It's really not spicy at all, but if you
want that in your chili, you can request red pepper flakes on top, since all the toppings are no extra charge. At any rate, I like it quite a bit. It's still on the expensive side, but that's just the occupational hazard of eating at Ponte Fresco.
Ponte Fresco Chili: 8.5/10
Quizno's Flatbread Sa... don't make me say it
Day One of the "experiment" was today, January 16. For the roughly lunch-time meal (some might call it "lunch"), I went over to Quizno's to check out the new small flatbread sandwiches they have. And yes, I refuse to call these things by their official name because I hate it. The cutesy-poo mispronunciation is bad enough - then you cut the word in half and end it with the even cutesier "ee" sound? God. No. Awful.
The sandwiches themselves are not awful, however. There are six varieties including the two new lower-calorie ones, though only the original four were on sale at this particular Quizno's. Either way, they were only two bucks each, which isn't a bad deal - it's comparable to the McDonald's Snacker, except better (albeit a bit more expensive as well). I don't really dig on bacon or the many Italian sandwich meats, so I went with the Bistro Steak Melt and the Sonoma Turkey. Two of the flatbreads wasn't bad for a light lunch (okay, a "light" 620 calories, but that's not too bad for the larger of two mid-day mealettes). The Bistro Steak Melt definitely takes the cake between the two; the peppercorn sauce added a nice amount of flavor without being overwhelming, and the warm steak-and-mozzarella combination at the center was good. The flatbread is also a nice delivery system; the pieces I had were warm and chewy, and they held the sandwich's contents well.
The turkey wasn't quite as good; it was fine, but between the pepper jack cheese and chipotle mayo, I found the spice-to-flavor ratio to be a bit on the high side. There wasn't much to taste but turkey and hotness, and that's passable but undistinguished to me. Again, however, the flatbread worked well. My only other complaint was the tomato pieces sprinkled across the top of both sandwiches (along with lettuce, which was fine), but that's just because I didn't know it was coming. I'm sure I could ask for them to be left off in the future, and anyway they were thankfully easy to pick off.
Bistro Steak Melt: 8.5/10
Sonoma Turkey: 5/10At 3-ish, I went to Ponte Fresco, which for a while a number of months ago (just after it opened) I frequented to such a degree that several of the staff knew my name. Ponte Fresco's problem is it's on the expensive side - their basic products are salads where you pick all your toppings and they chop and mix them for you, but they charge by the topping, which means you can get to eight bucks pretty quick, a bit on the high side for just a
salad - and the soup is no exception, as a small costs $3.45
pre-tax. The upside is that it's good soup. I had a nice, rich beef chili there the other day, and today I went for the spicy chicken enchilada. A solid, creamy broth is filled with chunks of chicken and various vegetables (red peppers, black beans, corn - wow, is
any of those technically a vegetable? Whatever), and you even get free tortilla strips sprinkled on top. Ponte Fresco doesn't have nutritional info on their website yet - this is their first mainland US store after years in Puerto Rico - so I can only guess at the actual health value (or lack thereof), though I'm guessing that the creamy base rules out low-fat. (Still, how bad can a "small" anything really be for you? At least there's that.) But it's quite tasty - it lives up to the spicy name (the top of my head beaded up with sweat) and there is no skimping on the ingredients within. Yeah, it's too expensive, but it's a lot closer to getting what you pay for than you would at most places.
Spicy Chicken Enchilada Soup: 8/10
A new beginning
I'm taking a bit of a risk here. You've probably noticed - assuming you've even checked this blog in the last six months - that I don't update the Frugal Gourmand very much. There are a number of reasons for that, none really worth delving into. However, I've come to think that a little rebranding may perhaps be in order. I have no idea whether this idea is going to work at all - it may be unworkable, or tedious, or unworkably tedious. But I think it's worth a shot.
The proposal is this: I eat out a lot. Mostly at lunch, at work. You'd think this would be a gold mine for this blog, but it really hasn't been. Well, that's all about to change, if this works.
As some of you may know, I've been having issues lately with heartburn. One thing I need to do is lose weight, but another thing that's helpful is eating smaller meals/portions. As you may also know, I do have a history of eating a lot, and while I can't eat like I used to, I still have a habit of cramming down more than is necessary at a lot of meals, and eating at odd hours, which doesn't help things. So I'm making an effort to eat smaller meals and just do so a couple more times a day - say, food at 9, 12, 3 and 7 or something like that. The 12 and 3 in particular are times where I might have cause to wander to one of the many establishments around here for one or both of those "meal"-times.
So is this going somewhere? Yes. I'm going to be doing (relatively) quick takes of my daily eating experiences in this space, when I purchase food from a dining establishment. I'll be trying some new things, re-experiencing some old things, and surely repeating myself sometimes, though I won't have much to add in times like that. I figure this will also act as a check of sorts - there are definitely people reading this who will give me crap for eating too much garbage, so it sort of behooves me to try and keep on a somewhat healthier track. At any rate, I think this could be interesting, and I believe it was Rudnik who once commented on the main blog that it was "fun" to have me describe new dining experiences. That's probably a little strong for this experiment, but hey, you never know.
