What I Made for Dinner: July 2, 2010

Pasta with grilled chicken, asparagus, and green onions.

So the conference was excellent, both the setting and the content. But the food? Not so much. First off, when this

is the view from your room, you should be able to guess without asking the ballpark figure for a nice on-site meal, say a salad followed by some poached grouper and roasted potatoes. FOUR MILLION DOLLARS, PLEASE. The fine-dining places at the resort were out of the question for us. (Even ordering a simple chicken sandwich with a side of fruit made me cringe a little.) The conference included a few meals, but they offered pretty unremarkable food.

(Second, I thought it interesting that the resort didn't feature local foods at any of its restaurants. The food was the same stuff you could get just about anywhere. Given that kind of generic menu-planning and the prices, I concluded that you don't go to Marco Island for the cuisine; you go for the manatees and beaches and dolphins and margaritas. And you really shouldn't be eating anyway, you in the swimsuit, but if you absolutely must, something fried is probably just around the corner.)

So it was nice, tonight, to be home with my grill and my inexpensive, readily-available groceries. Everything got tossed in olive oil and lemon juice, grilled, then tossed with pasta and more olive oil and lemon juice. It was delicious and nowhere near four million dollars. No manatees here in the Great Plains, though.