Google maps sadly looks like it agrees. We will see!
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Cut up the last of the homegrown peppers for the freezer. An hour later, rubbed the corner of my eye. Now the world is made of fire
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I would say this mirrors my experience. I don’t know when the food got worse, but it definitely seems lower quality now. I got a chocolate chip cookie a few weeks ago. I could have just gotten a pack of Grandma’s cookies from the vending machine. Meh. Not worth the $ or calories.
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My knitting group used to meet at Panera because they had a big table we could snag. Some of the food was pretty good and some wasn’t anything special, but it was just soup and salad and sandwiches, so not exactly a culinary experience. Many of the staff seemed to be high school kids and there were some pretty hilarious stories, including the guy who just could not understand the whole concept of soup in a bread bowl, and the many people who could not deal with the process of putting hot water in a cup for tea.
I think that Panera really struggled with the pandemic. I got a lot of panicked emails at first where they were selling gallons of milk and whole family dinners.
During 2020/21 when we were driving back and forth between Ohio and Wisconsin quite a bit, it seemed like they really changed a lot of things - the menu got much smaller and they pushed the order ahead and pick up model.
I haven’t been in Panera for over a year but I guess we’re getting food from there next week as a school fundraiser, so we’ll see.
I am mystified by the appeal of “bowls” as a dining category!
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This is the majority of my cooking and eating 
what’s not to love? Cook rice. Rice soaks up delicious flavors. Profit.
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That is a truly baffling itinerary.
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Not from this side of the world. Hawaii is on the way to Vancouver. Our flights were:
Perth- Sydney - Hawaii,
Hawaii - Vancouver
Vancouver - somewhereinUSA-Sydney-Perth.
Like, given it takes so long to get out of here, if you are going past somewhere nice you do your best to stop in and make it part of the trip!
(Related, my body reacted badly to going from Hawaii to Vancouver in winter and little sleep on a plane. I will forever be paying a “daytime flights” tax because of that, assuming I get on a plane again).
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Oh I was thinking more in terms of packing, lol. But that also makes sense 
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None of the airport terminals we will visit on next week’s trip have lounges. Grump geump
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I have been letting this marinate, and finally give up and have to ask… what do you mean? Like you mostly eat stuff that could be sold as a “bowl” so it isn’t appealing to eat out, or you mostly don’t eat that way and don’t want to?
Cause the marketing is silly, but also clear? My food/cultural background is probably very different from yours, so please be gentle and honest, I just can’t figure it out.
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Why a bowl and not just a plate? Everything I’ve had that has been a “bowl” seems like the same food that used to be on a plate.
Mind you, I don’t eat out a ton, and it seemed like all of a sudden, everyplace was putting regular food in a bowl and not just on a plate, and expecting me to be excited about it. LOL
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I hear you and I think maybe this might be a more USA perspective? Like I can think of a couple of restaurants near me that are now selling “bowls”, but the bowl is, like, pulled pork and mashed potatoes and green beans with some sort of topper.
Like this from KFC:
This is not traditionally bowl food, but I think that companies are doing it because it requires way less packaging and also is very couch/on the go eating than a traditional plate set up for the same kind of food.
As someone who sometimes really has issues with certain foods touching/being contaminated (yeah, yeah, tease me all you like), this can be a distressing phenomenon.
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Oooh yeah, @marcela’s example is rough. Here I saw it start with burrito bowls and salad bowls, and now a bunch of places that do sandwiches or salads have bought a rice cooker and offer a bowl with that as a base
Or middle eastern, greek and south asian places offering a smaller version of their old platter with one base and one topping instead of rice and potatoes and maybe a side of bread and salad and 2-3 curries/falafel/meats (with the old platter still available).
I may have chosen to make mashed potato bowls in the privacy of my own home but definitely is a marketing thing there!
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When bigger kid couldn’t have gluten it was easier to give him a burrito bowl than deal with finding gf wraps. These days carbs don’t always agree with me, so protein, veg, and sauce in a bowl makes an easy meal I can eat on the couch.
Bowls as a marketing gimmick are odd. The idea of a simple and portable and less messy, flexible meal is good.
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This is a big part for me. could I put my nice sloppy delightful curry and rice on a plate? Yes. But then I will stir it, and fling stuff everywhere, so why would I do that? Enter, my giant Pyrex bowl. 
ETA bonus can easily be eaten while standing when you live with tiny goblin creatures
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Our wide soup?pasta? Bowls have become our staple crockery for dinner for the tiny goblin reason, even though we eat at the table. High sides also slightly increase protection from flung food.
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Highlights of my trip thus far:
- Flight delayed because they couldn’t find the plane. Seriously, I got to the gate ~10 min prior to boarding and the gate attendant was announcing that they were still trying to find it and would update us shortly.
- Flight delayed because despite trying to hide the plane from the snow (and themselves) it didn’t work and needed to be de-iced
- Flight delayed because de-icing caused one of the electrical systems to shut down, or at least that was their best guess as to the cause of the shutdown since the same thing happened after de-icing yesterday
- Plane returned to gate for reboot, but maintenance decided that they had to take it out of service given repeat failure so flight delayed while they searched for a new plane
- Miraculously they found a new plane, but previous plane not allowed to leave gate so we got to take a walking tour of the airport to find a new gate (DIA is not a small airport, fyi)
- Flight delayed while they try to figure out what’s wrong with wifi on new plane
Fortunately wifi is not a critical system and I’m now on the ground at destination, but today was a way longer day than I was expecting.
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Scrivener has decided that I’m not allowed to use it anymore. In the middle of NaNoWriMo. The version I have isn’t even supported on my version of MacOS.
I’m pretty sure this problem will be solved by upgrading to Scrivener 3 (as per support message) but I’ve been putting that off because I don’t want to learn a different interface and this is the worst time to learn a different interface.
Someone learn from my mistake, please.
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Apparently holiday decorations are supposed to be “in style” because there are articles like this out…
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HA. My ideal holiday decor can be described as “kitchy, from goodwill, but just not too much of it”
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