Fast Food on the way to Skiing... and Waffle Cabin!

Fast food might be cheap, full of preservatives, and commercialized (I mean it's a hundred billion dollar business), but sometimes it's savory and keeps you alive during long car trips. There's also something to be said for the ability to create the same taste over and over again and have the food to be tasty enough that people keep going back.

Since I didn't grow up with fast food, I don't crave it very often, though sometimes curiosity gets the best of me. Here are my favorites:

Arby's: I visited my first Arby's at the age of 23 or something. It was a bit of a revelation. Mass produced deliciously seasoned curly fries!

Sauce dispensing machines... with horseradish? really?!

You need quite a bit of sauce to make the sandwich work, but then again so do most restaurants. Who the heck cares that you had to pump it out of a plastic bag hidden in a tin box.

Roast beef with cheese on onion bread. Not bad, and it costs less than the taxes at a lot of dinners!

Hmm ice cream. It tastes the same as a lot of overpriced ice cream in expensive restaurants... but with Hershey's fudge.

Dunkin Donuts: Apparently a lot of Americans wake up to this. I found out that they have this vanilla chai tea that's absolutely delicious. I don't really drink caffeine, but I'm willing to drink something that tastes like sugary milk with some cinnamon spice!

Nice view eh?

And then I had these absurdly awesome hash browns!! They're so good!

And then I got this disgusting sandwich. WTF is that inside?! did someone paint a yellow circle on my egg white? It makes me so sad that people eat this. I'd rather pay up and get Finagle Bagel with real bagels and real eggs. (but I'd still get the tea and hash browns!!)

It wasn't all fun and expedient billion dollar franchises. A lot of Vermont ski resorts have the Waffle Cabin, which deserves a cult following of its own. They have perfected the sugar waffle... and we had to wait at least 15 minutes for the dude to finish his tinkle break.

But I got my perfect waffle. The batter is somewhere between donut and cake. A patina of crunchy sugar is cooked into every nook and cranny. My teeth hurt and my stomach longs for it as I type. I paid them a lofty 75c to drizzle that baby with chocolate syrup that usually ends up on my face and clothes.

It was a great experience and all, but it's not for the health conscious. Then again, most fine dining isn't for the health conscious either. Great restaurants cook the food in butter and oil too, friends; they're just clever enough emulsify/foam/otherwise hide it marbled or soaked into meat and fungi.