What your lunch says about your personality.

Or, at least: What MY lunch says about my personality.

Being in the professional world, I’ve become very familiar, through a series of HR-imposed team-building exercises, with the array of personality profile quizzes that are currently out there.  One of the more popular ones is the DISC assessment, which determines if you are Dominant, an Influencer, Steady, or Calculating.  It would probably shock no one who knows me personally that I fall under the category of Steady.  “Steadies” are fiercely loyal, friendly, sympathetic to others, and dependable.  Their primary weakness, however, is that they don’t deal well with change.

Introduce my lunch.  I forgot to bring anything for lunch today.  Happens at least 1-2x a week.  I keep a stash of food at my desk (i.e. canned ravioli and Ramen, which only technically passes as food in that it slowly kills you with sodium, rather than dying from starvation), but I try to reserve those for days that I absolutely cannot leave the office due to some emergency.  Other days, my go-to is Pizza Hut.

Seriously.

What is a food blogger doing at Pizza Hut, you ask?  Getting a salad to go, I answer.

Pizza Hut has “to-go” salads?  Yes, yes they do.  Something I’ve been familiar with since I was a kid, but is apparently news to 90% of Americans.  For $4.83 (give or take some tax) you can get a giant pile o’ salad from their salad bar and take it with you.  Weight doesn’t matter.  That’s the awesome thing.  See, Pizza Hut is 1.5 miles from my office; there’s a grocery store less than half a mile from my office that has a salad bar as well, but they charge $4.99 a pound.  At Pizza Hut, it’s like Priority Mail Flat Rate boxes—if it fits, it ships.  108 cubic inches of salad.  I’ve never weighed one, but I guarantee my average salad is at least a couple pounds, once you factor cottage cheese, dressing, and some sort of non-salad “salad” in there.

Growing up, my parents both usually worked weekends.  My mom got home on Saturdays around noon, and we would go to Pizza Hut to get salads & breadsticks to go, pick up a rental video, then come home, chow down while watching a movie, and then clean the house together.  P. much every Saturday, that was the routine.  So Pizza Hut has a very special place in my heart.  Plus…they all have T. Marzetti’s Honey French dressing, which makes my heart even happier.

Heaven in a bottle.

Anyway.  I drove to Pizza Hut.  Only to find out that their salad bar was BROKEN.  No salad.  O_o <-- If I could figure out a way to make that face cry, I would.

There’s a Quizno’s, like, RIGHT across the street.  Also, a Hong Kong Inn, a Sonic, and a variety of other fast food establishments.

But no…the heart wants what the heart wants.  And today, the heart wants produce.

I accidentally left my smartphone at the office, so I head out on a journey…to try to REMEMBER where the next-closest P.Hut is. (Ugh---how did we find anything before smart phones?)  I vaguely remembered another one on the northwest side of town, so I head that way.  And yes…there USED to be one, but it’s now Kenny’s Non-Pizza Hut Pub & Grill. *sigh* Here, we’re surrounded by Burger King, Pizza Inn, Papa Murphy’s, Papa Johns (I see now that P.Hut got squeezed out of the market, despite their superior salad offerings)… do I give up & settle for a Whopper?  Hecks no.  It’s freakin’ SALAD DAY!

Then I remember one on the west-central part of town.  So I head south.  Thankfully, that one is still there, and the salad bar is intact.  Thank HEAVEN!

My epic salad journey.  13.93 miles roundtrip.

And yet…it’s different.  Where is the cottage cheese?  Where are the little crunchy lo mein noodles that have no nutritional value whatsoever? Where did this cauliflower come from?   WHY ARE THERE NO CROUTONS?????  *takes a breath*  It’s okay, it’s okay.  We’ll deal.

And that, my friends, is how I logged 14 miles on my car to get THIS:

You’ll notice that conspicuously large piece of cauliflower in the  bottom right corner?  Yeah…that’s where I usually put the cottage cheese.  The cauliflower is really just a place holder.

But….in reality…completely worth it.

So, while I haven’t reached that Sheldon Cooper level of control where Monday is Thai Night and Tuesdays are always spent at the Cheesecake Factory… I fear it’s coming.