Who Killed The Cobb Salad? An Inspector Jamison Mystery
Since Gloria and Eli 17.8 have been gone, I haven't been eating much.I tend to do that when I get involved in something. Hours pass and I don't even realize it was time for a meal.
While they're gone, I've gone into the stripped-down eating routine: light breakfast, no lunch, substantial dinner.
Yesterday, for some reason, I decided that I wanted a Cobb salad for dinner.
Cobb salads are "hearty." Chicken, bacon, avocado, cheese, egg, tomato. It's basically a stealth all-you-can-eat buffet with lettuce.
Oh, and it typically comes with Ranch or Thousand Island dressing, either of which is about a thousand calories for an eye dropper full.
This is the perfect salad for people who want to pretend they're eating healthy, even though they're consuming a 1,500 calorie meal.
It wasn't long, though, before I realized that Cobb salad was barely alive. Actually, less than alive, because the only place I could find one was TGIFridays.
And then the murders began.
I wanted to find out what killed my unhealthy friend, so I began to investigate, and came up with three prime suspects:
#1 Kale
I still don't even know what this is. It's green, and it looks like lettuce, but it's not lettuce. It's cabbage, which is lettuce's poor cousin who lives in that broken down farmhouse in the country with all the rusted cars in the front yard. It's cabbage with better marketing.
I saw quite a few kale salads when I was looking through menus. Jealousy over cabbage's low status? Hmm.
#2 Caesar
I remember when a Cobb salad was on very single menu. The Caesar? Italian restaurants only. Now, every single menu I looked at had a Caesar salad available.
I can see the advantages, from a restaurant's point of view. The Caesar is basically Romaine lettuce and croutons, with dressing thrown on top. It's the easiest salad to make. A Cobb salad is a relationship, but the Caesar is a one-night stand.
A mob hit? Hmm.
#3 Health
This is not considered a strong suspect, since we're an unhealthy country in terms of obesity. We like to pretend we're health-adjacent, though, and maybe that was enough to kill a salad full of lifespan-shortening delights.
I dismissed suspect #3, because Health had an alibi: Golden Corral. If Health was going to murder anyone, it wouldn't be the Cobb Salad.
I'm getting paid by the hour, and I've already submitted the tab, so I'm going to cut to the chase here: two suspects are in custody for the murder of Cobb salad. That's right, Kale and Caesar combined in the despicable murder of the only salad that could be classified as "comfort food." Two inferior salads, trying to establish themselves as kingpins, staged a coup.
Et tu, Caesar?
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