Is That a Fractal in Your Guacamole?

Why do I always think that a busy week will yield a calmer weekend, and I won't be struggling at the last minute on Sunday night to write my blog. This past week had three things I like best: visiting with my daughter, this time antiquing and eating, two other things I like a lot; opera and dinner with my husband; and attending my son's ice hockey game, followed by more eating.

I have tried to be disciplined about my eating, so as not to backslide, but as anyone knows, that's anything but easy. Most of the food was pub stuff, and even the salads were pretty hefty. The post hockey game meal was at a chain restaurant that sort of intrigues me. Chipotle's Mexican Grill.  No kitchy pseudo-Mexican decor. Wood, cement, stainless steel, and a pass-on-down the line kind of service.

And in a disposable bowl (it could have been edible, for all I know) the biggest heap of...things... that could loosely be associated with Mexican cuisine. Very loosely. Rice. Brown and white (?) Corn that looked a lot like canned corn to me. Red and black beans. A very liquid sour cream. Several interpretations of beef, some chicken, salsa, chopped lettuce, and the brightest green guacamole I have ever seen in my life. It looked like a St.Patrick's Day take on guacamole. Each ingredient was piled atop the one preceding it by a cheery young person wielding an ice cream scoop, until it was all topped with a mountain of guacamole.

I'm not saying it was bad.  First of all, it was cheap, and I was starving and numb with cold, having spent the previous two and half hours, or more, sitting in a freezing ice arena that apparently was relying on the air conditioning system to keep the ice from melting.

No, it wasn't bad. I read recently that chopped salads, such as Cobb salads, are all the rage now, and this was sort of a chopped salad take on ...something or other. It also wasn't Mexican. And I have to admit that there is probably a place for non-food like Chipotle serves.  I just wish that customers wouldn't go away thinking they had eaten Mexican food, that this is what Mexican food tastes like, and that the belly up to the trough approach is good enough for an ancient and wonderful cuisine we are popularizing right out of existence.

When I was thinking through this blog last night, my wakeful three a.m. brain  somehow connected what I had eaten with the Fibunacci sequence, that series of numbers that some physicists see has the hand of God in the universe, creating the whorls in the center of a sunflower, which are repeated in the pattern of galaxies and pine cones and endless other things, but tonight, I can't really see the hand of God in that bowl full of indistinguishable stuff. Now maybe Cobb salad and fractals  have a connection, but I won't let it keep me awake.