Lunch Meeting . . .

So today I had a meeting for a board I am on and it was a catered eat-in thing.  Food was from Treebeard's a local establishment.  I like Treebeard's a lot but it seems like the only foods you are only allowed to get catered are red beans and rice and shrimp etouffee.  Never have I ever seen any other food from Treebeard's catered and people get TB catered here a LOT.  Since I was with folks that I don't know real well I had to surreptitiously take a picture of my lunch.  Salad with a nice snappy vinaigrette, a dab of red beans and rice with some sausage and shrimp etouffee with rice.  The shrimp etouffee and gumbo are the only things I get at TB so I was cool with the menu.

The lighting was terrible in the conference room where the meeting was and obviously I wasn't able to go all Instagram on my food b/c that would have taken too long to set up and snap.  I didn't want to be real obvious about messing with my phone at the time.  Dark blob in the back is the red beans and rice.  I don't always like this. They put something in it that has a weird taste to me and I don't know what kind of spice it is.  Maybe cardamom or something along those lines.  Today the weird taste was not so prevalent and the beans were not as spicy as they usually seem to me.  Liked them better this way.  I eat them plain, no cheese or green onions.  That's just wrong.

Now the etoufee on the other hand was spicier than usual.  So much so that it made me break out in a sweat towards the end.  That combined with poor air conditioning in the room.  And poor a/c by Houston standards means it was "normal" vs. "arctic" which in the summer it nearly always is everywhere.  Having grown to love the sub arctic air in all the buildings here it was seriously a bummer to have to sit in a barely cool conference room and eat hot food.  Once I stopped eating I was fine though.  No worries.  Didn't get any of the TB bread they serve.  It sucks.  Let's be honest.  It has a sort of quaint quality to it, but at the end of the day it's just some mediocre store bought bread served with some tasteless margarine.  I prefer to use my calories for the etouffee.  Don't get me wrong though- I do like Treebeard's.  Its many many other redeeming qualities and fresh fruit cups with mint leaves more than make up for sucky bread.

Red beans and rice= 3 microwaves, but get a recommended
Shrimp etouffee = 4 microwaves and a recommended.

When I first moved here TB was one of the few places I knew to go for lunch so I was hitting the etouffee hard in the early days.  Plus I was preggers then so etouffee plus homemade cake was a pretty infallible combo.  Probably for that reason I will always feel a fondness for Treebeard's.  And you know who I ate there with the very first time?  That's right people.  Chungry.