The Chicken Bone Vexation

Last night after a long day at work neither one of us were much in the mood to cook dinner. We talked ourselves into dashing out for something close by so we could hurry up and get back home to get some more work done before going to sleep. Now when we're home in Palm Springs, there are plenty of options for dining. But when we're in San Diego, the restaurants close by the beach house are really not all that great. So we ended up at Applebee's. Not exactly my favorite Casual Dining Restaurant to begin with. I much prefer the local chain Coco's to be honest. But anyway I digress. So we went into Applebee's and studied the menu. We looked and looked and looked and had trouble finding anything healthy. I eventually settled on the Three Cheese Chicken Penne Pasta bowl. Dinner was served fairly promptly, for which I was grateful. I had a few bites- it lacked flavor and wasn't all that good, but as I was hungry it worked. Suddenly I took a bite and felt something sharp cut into my upper gum. I winced in pain and had an immediate "empty the mouth of its contents" reaction. Being ever the gentleman, I grabbed a side dish and spit out what I had tried to eat. The sharp pain persisted and I realized I had bitten down on something foreign. I was in a fair amount of pain, so I excused myself to the gent's room in an attempt to discreetly dislodge the foreign item from my mouth. The manner in which it was wedged in between my teeth, and the depth it had been pushed in made it quite difficult to remove. Finally after an hour fifteen minutes I managed to extract what I later realized was a chicken bone sliver. It looked something like this bone at left. Ok not exactly, but you get the idea. Blech. I was so grossed out by this. I returned to the table and let the manager know what happened. Of course she deducted the cost of my meal from the bill. Good job, because I certainly wasn't about to eat any of it. As we waited for the final bill, I stared out the window and saw the In-N-Out Burger joint across the parking lot. I was still hungry and longed for something to eat. But I had lost my appetite for anything. I'll admit that I can't exactly fault Applebee's that a massive chicken bone sliver appeared in my pasta bowl dinner, but it has turned me off on ever dining with them again. The quality of the food wasn't all that great to begin with. I'm wondering if they started buying lower grade/quality chicken to save money, hence the chicken breast with scraps of bone sliver in it. Blech. So goodbye, Applebee's, hello anyone else. One good thing came of this Chicken Bone Vexation...a topic for today's blog post. Thanks for reading.
-Rick Rockhill