Game Day Food (Player)

Hello Readers,

Following my post about game day food, I thought that I would make a post about real game day food, which is the food you should eat when YOU have to play today.  The first thing you must understand is that all good food is essentially made up of three things, fats, carbohydrates, and proteins. Getting the proper amount of each of these things will be key to ensuring that you can play your best when you need to.

Proteins are something that you want to avoid for the most part on game day. There is no doubt they are good for you, just not when you have to play soon. Proteins take a long time and a lot of energy for the body to digest. So not only will your body not have gotten the energy out of the protein by the time it’s time to play, but you will actually be taking away energy that could be used for playing and using it for digestion. So in short, try to stay clear of proteins on game day.

Fats get an extremely bad reputation that’s not always completely deserved. As long as you are eating the right types of fats, and not too much of them, they are great to have in your pregame diet. Arctic peoples have eaten seal fat for thousands of years because it is easy for your body to get energy from and that energy arrives quickly, all of this makes certain fats an essential for your game day (in moderation of course)

Carbohydrates are another great thing to eat on game day. Like fats they are quickly and efficiently turned into energy that can be used by your body. But be careful, sometimes the energy can be used to quickly leaving you feeling sluggish if you ate a meal that had almost all carbs and no other sources of energy.

Serving size depends on your size, how soon you will be competing in comparison to when you eat and the level of intensity of your sport. Your last mean should be eaten about four hours before competition and snacks are okay between your competition. All of these things should help to ensure you preform in the best way possible! (379 words)

Game Day Foods (Spectator)

Hello Readers,

I am writing this blog after just spending an afternoon with my family watching some great football games and enjoying some great game day snacks that I thought I would share with the few people that will read this. The foods I will be talking about will be fatty, calorie filled, and what my dad calls “heart stoppers”. For those reason I would advise anyone who has a lack of self control when it comes to food to stop reading now…or your heart might be the one stopping.

The first food I would like to discuss is a personal favorite of mine, bacon wrapped lil’ smokies. These little pieces of heaven are, as the name suggests, little smokies that have been wrapped in candied bacon and attached with a tooth pick sticking through both of them. I will admit that I have never prepared this delicacy, so I am not as informed as I would like to be on how to cook the smokies, all in know is that it involves a crock pot. I apologize for my lack of knowledge. I do however know that to candy the bacon you simply sprinkle brown sugar over the strips. When these two delicious things come together they create quite possibly the best game day snake ever. When you bring this to a party it says “I made the most labor intensive snack, therefore I am the best one to invite over for the next game".

Another essential for any game day party are wings. I would go into detail about how to prepare wings, but I normally just buy them or someone else brings them so I really have no idea how to make them. Of the people who bring  the best wings by far is Matt, a family friend. He has perfected his “super-secret seductive $awws”, giving it exactly the right amount of spice and tang. This sauce could easily go up against any Buffalo Wild Wings sauce and destroy it. The only place that wings fell short to bacon wrapped lil’ smokies is the messiness factor. The smokies have a tooth pick to grab allowing you to check your phone of grab the remote without getting everything dirty. I think that everyone knows that you aren't going to eat wings without getting everything you touch dirty.

There are many more foods to eat on game day, some that are unique to my family and some that are universal favorites. A description of some of the foods that my family and I enjoy and that are not so well known may be coming in a later post. See you then!

PS-if anyone other than Ms. A reads this and thinks they have a better sauce than the  super-secret seductive $awws (and you’re not creepy), send me some and I’ll be the judge. (477 words)

Large Chain Restaurants v. Family Owned Restaurants

Hello readers.

Today I will talk about a topic that I feel I know enough about to discusses in this blog. That topic is the differences and similarities between large food chains like the Olive Garden and Pizza Hut and smaller family owned operations such as Zio Johnos and Bob’s Your Uncle Pizza Café (located in Iowa City). I tried to pick restaurants that served food that was similar to each other to help keep one variable the same, the type of food.

The first difference that comes to my mind would be the budget for décor. When you walk into these two different types of restaurants you can immediately tell if you’re in a nationwide chain or not. The large chains tend to have more of an identity, by that I mean their name is on everything and with Pizza Hut for example the color red seems to be everywhere. Also the little things have more detail in them, everything from simply have higher quality menus to having nice booths/chairs and decorative things on the walls. With the smaller restaurants they may have booths that aren't attached to the floor, or a less strict dress code for their employees, or perhaps a color scheme that doesn't seem to work as well. 

Another very important difference is the food. With the larger restaurants there are normally more options to choose from and in some cases those options are more competitively priced. This is because, as you may expect, they sell more food which in turn allows them to lower their prices. Also, because they are serving a larger number of people it makes it more economical to serve things or add things to dishes that wouldn't make sense financially for smaller operations to serve. For an example, let’s say the large chain serves one thousand people per day (I am making these numbers up) and ten people order the special dish and at the smaller chain they serve one hundred people a day, but only one person orders the dish a day. Even though the ratio of people being served to people ordering the dish is the same (100:1) the larger chain has ten times the reasons to keep that item on their menu.  

Throughout this post I feel as though I have made to small of an arguments in favor of the small family owned restaurants, and that’s not what I intended to do. Typically I feel like I am a more valued customer when I go to small restaurants and I think the people who work there are nicer and make me feel like family. The food in some cases is even better than the large chains, it has more of a home feel. And if those aren’t reason enough, it is very important to patronize local businesses.  If people stopped going to the family owned stores then all we would have to eat would be the large chains and we would miss out on all of the great things that I mentioned before. A similar situation has happened with Walmart, they have become so large that no ma and pop store can compete with them because they can always be under sold. This is good for the consumer to get the best price possible, but it eliminates diversity and I think that would be a tragic thing to happen to the food industry.

So in conclusion, I think that large chains offers better prices, more options and a more complete décor, small restaurants can still compete. This, in my opinion, is because of the food, and the friendly feeling you get when you arrive. Even if you prefer the large chains, it may still be a nice change of pace to try a local place, and also it is a great way to support your local economy. (649 words)