While he is not a vegetarian, the majority of the food he eats at home is meatless. He could, however, not exist without cheese. He loves almost every variety of cheese, and one kind or another is the principal ingredient in almost everything he cooks.
Mr. Burrow buys a large part of his food at Aldi, the German-based no-frills grocer. Almost never does he see a difference in quality between store brands (such as those sold at Aldi) and their higher-priced national competition. The rest he gets at the local Hy-Vee store, where he watches weekly sales and gets Fuel Saver reward points on his purchases.
While he does not eat out often, Mr. Burrow particularly enjoys the experience of dining in a good (but not pretentious) restaurant. He especially enjoys good Mexican restaurants, but he also likes Asian, Italian, Greek, and of course traditional American food.
Mr. Burrow loves breakfast food. When he's travels, he enjoys having an omelette at a family restaurant, and he has lamented that many traditional American family restaurants have gone out of business in recent years.. When he travels south of Interstate 70, he enjoys stopping at the Waffle House for some "chunked and covered" hash browns. He also enjoys unpretentious doughnuts and rolls, such as those found at Dunkin' Donuts or Tim Hortons (something else that needs to be strictly limited with diabetes).
Something he loves that he can still eat with diabetes are salads. He often orders dinner salads in restaurants and enjoys making them for himself at home.
Mr. Burrow grew up with fast food, and he particularly enjoys it when he is travelling. He loves simple breakfast sandwiches like the McDonalds Egg McMuffin or a ham, egg, and cheese biscuit from Hardees. He enjoys checking out regional fast food chains whenever he travels. Two summers in Mississippi also made him a big fan of the Southern regional burger chain, Krystal, and when he's traveling in California he always has to stop in at Fatburger. He has also enjoyed chains like Shake Shack, Five Guys, Burgerville, Bojangle's, Portillo's, El Pollo Loco, Zaxby's, Pollo Campero, Nando's, and Dickey's BBQ.
While Mr. Burrow can honestly tell his students he did not drink when he was in high school, as an adult he does enjoy having a few drinks. His likes almost anything made with rum--especially dark rums, like the famous Newfoundland Screech. Rum mixed with grapefruit juice and the infamous New Orleans hurricane are probably his favorite drinks, though as a diabetic he most often drinks rum with diet cola. He also likes vodka drinks, after first tasting Stolichnaya when he visited the old Soviet Union, and sweet Spanish or Russian champagne. He also enjoys hard cider, and when he drinks beer, his favorite brew is Busch.
Most of what Mr. Burrow drinks is non-alcoholic. Before the diabetic diagnosis, he drank a lot of juice--most of it unsweetened grapefruit juice. In recent years he mostly has low-carb juice drinks. He's rarely seen without a cup of coffee, although he probably throws out more coffee than he drinks. He especially likes the coffee and chicory mixture that he learned to drink in graduate school in the South. He fails to see any attraction whatsoever to bottled water, but he does drink lots of tap water and homemade unsweetened iced tea. You're unlikely to see him with a milk moustache. He did not like milk as a child, and he doesn't care much more for it as an adult. To him, milk is an ingredient (which he typically buys canned)--and something that is best made into cheese.
LEFT: The McDonalds Egg McMuffin is one of Mr. Burrow's favorite breakfast foods.
RIGHT: Mr. Burrow at a family reunion potluck in Fredericksburg, Iowa, in 1993
Screech--the dregs of the barrel make the best rum
LEFT: Those who haven't been to Dixie may know White Castle, a chain that is virtually identical to Krystal.
RIGHT: M-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m ... donuts! (Click above for full-size pictures.)
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