Fast food you can feel good about - Chipotle!

      Recently, our family ate at a restaurant we'd only heard about...from a documentary.  Uh, okay.  Have you ever chosen a place to eat based on a documentary?  I guess my family is a bit
s-t-r-a-n-g-e.  We ate at Chipotle, while traveling out of town. We had watched a well-known documentary, “Food, Inc.”, about two months ago while trying to learn more about the food industry in the United States.

      We enjoyed listening to the owner of Chipotle fast food restaurants describe how he started his business, and why. You can do a search on the internet about Chipotle and how the owner got the business started, but basically he was convinced that it was indeed possible for a fast food restaurant to offer Mexican-style food that contained pasture-raised, organic meat, organic vegetables, grains, and beans, and non-genetically modified food ingredients that were mostly local to the area.

      Knowing that we were going to be in a city that had a Chipotle restaurant, we decided to include this restaurant in our meal plans for dinner on the last evening as we would be leaving the “big city.”

      At first, we thought it looked empty (never a good thing at meal time), but there were people inside – always a good sign. Keeping in mind that this is a sit-down restaurant but in a fast-food style, the atmosphere and décor was more on the “spartan” casual side of things.

      We got into line and found that it was fairly easy to choose what we wanted to eat. There were about six meal options and about the same amount of meat choices: fajita-style chicken, beef, and pork, and shredded beef, pork, chicken, and maybe one or two other options. We could choose from an enchilada, a fajita-style enchilada, tacos, burritos, and “bowls”, which were basically the same food without a tortilla wrap.

      I think my husband really liked the minimal choices, because he was getting pretty hungry as we'd had a late breakfast and skipped lunch except for a quick snack mid-afternoon. Sometimes, we girls can take quite a while to make our meal choices at restaurants, so he was glad to see us quickly decide what we wanted to eat.

      In cafeteria style, we watched the employees build our fresh fajita-style burritos: fresh cilantro rice, choice of pinto or black beans, choice of salsas and pico de gallo, sour cream, guacamole, and more.

     Foolishly, we ordered two sides of chips and fresh tomato salsa...we ate very little of those. The burritos were HUMONGOUS and we could hardly eat those!

      The flavors were fresh and inviting, quick and delicious. We didn't mind the stark decor, because we were there...for the healthy food!

      It was excellent – not overly salty, not too spicy (at least, with the mild salsa versions we ordered), and the price was just right.

      Good thing, because we almost ended up washing dishes at Olive Garden the night before, when we realized how much our bill was going to be.

      Gulp.

      Guess we haven't eaten there in quite some time, and although the food was excellent, we've never paid that much money for Italian food! Maybe it's less expensive at the more local Olive Garden about an hour away from our town. I'm thinking that it hopefully doesn't cost $16-$18 at our nearest Olive Garden, but I could be wrong.

     Well, we didn't end up washing dishes at The Olive Garden, but we took advantage of the free hearty breakfast at our hotel the next morning, only ate a snack during the afternoon, and ate a less expensive dinner at Chipotle, which including a beverage was only about $7.50 per person.

     I guess it all evens out. All wonderful food this weekend; no one felt ill unless they overate. I was a little bit concerned about how we'd feel while eating different kinds of foods this weekend, away from home. I never thought I'd admit that eating some foods in fast-food restaurants and other restaurants will make us feel ill, but it does now.

     We try to eat around three-fourths of our meals from unprocessed foods, and we are just finding that our stomachs are more sensitive to either poorly prepared foods, or those that are overprocessed. We have found that our family can eat “safely” at Subway, Taco Bell, and Chipotle, and nicer restaurants, as long as we choose the right food options.


      Overall, if you have a Chipotle restaurant near your home, and you haven't tried it yet and are fine with eating more of a fast-food style meal, I think you'll like it.

     Of course, guys, you probably don't want to propose to your wife-to-be in a Chipotle restaurant, unless she's really into spartan-clean living-fast food types of things and that would impress her.

     Or else, you'll receive a resounding “no!” and you'll end up washing dishes to help pay for the broken window she attempted to shove you through.

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