ham, cheese, apple.

Say what you will, this is the real food that I craved.

This is the food that will get my body back. 

My younger brother just drove his family and me halfway across Colorado and all the way through Nebraska to the edge of Iowa for a wedding. He could have flown his family all the way there from California but instead he flew here to Denver to drive me to Iowa. I don't fly. Our niece was married.

And we drove through the very breadbasket of America, its gorgeous mathematic rows of corn and gigantic bank silos, its tractors that pull eighty foot implements, its combines big as houses and impressive monstrous farm equipment. The science of American farming is truly impressive. And yet, on the road back and forth we can not get a decent real meal that was not industrialized to the maximum. The truck stops are loaded with appealing food and none of it is healthful. Its depressing. And everyone, and I mean everyone is fat. Skinny people are unknown. How to explain this tragic dichotomy? It would take too long.

Enter [salad, north platte ne] in your browser and see what you get.

The tomatoes are refrigerated, the lettuce is pre-cut, put out, then returned to the refrigerator, the dressings are malevolent. If you ask for oil and vinegar you'll get insipid vegetable oil and 3rd rate vinegar. People just do not understand fresh vegetable salad or dressings. And that makes me sad.

Finally home, nearby Tony's to my rescue. All I want is simple real food. 

Would you like to see a post on the wedding and reception? I posted a story with photographs here.

These are small apples. Tiny, actually. They are intense with flavor.

The cheese is white cheddar aged nine months.

The ham is Tony's apple cured. 

The three together are astoundingly satisfying following two days of road food and restaurants.

The hotel staff was bragging about their breakfast omelets. This was a beautiful hotel. My room was luxurious. Two queen size beds for one skinny person. A very nice place in Red Oak, Iowa. 

I visualized a crap omelet. But I did not visualize one so crappy as they serve.

I should have known, and I did know, but I simply could not imagine anything so bad.

They were whipped egg to fluff and cooked in a pan that folds them in half with industrialized cheese for filling. So small it takes three to make one regular omelet. 

When I went down to the breakfast room I asked the attendant, "Who is the omelet maker?" She answered, "Oh. We don't have one. We buy them."

!

There in the heart of America where food comes from we are served commercialized industrialized mechanized food.

And everyone there loved them. They all think the omelets are perfect.

I was deflated. 

I told my brother this always happens even when the place has an assigned omelet making person. An expert. None of them make omelets good as I do. They just don't. In each case, and this is universal, I should be the assigned omelet maker and their omelet situation would be instantly improved. 

No brag. 

Just fact. 

I've been doing this for ten years. Check it out. Enter "omelet" in the search box up there ↖︎ and see what you get. You'll get more omelets than you care to look at, each one of them different.