From the Green Room: Killer Salads
Thursday, July 8, 2010 
From “The Daily Beast,” Tina Brown’s very fine website, comes some either very troubling or incredibly liberating culinary news this morning, depending upon your personal perspective:
Salad can kill you.
For those who are attempting to eat healthier, this is a considerable, comestible blow. For the rest of us who always suspected that if God wanted us to subsist on lettuce he would have made us all rabbits, this is, finally, some vindication.
If you seek sustenance from Applebee’s Pecan Crusted Chicken Salad, you will ingest 1340 calories. You could, however, save 20 calories, and put them in the metabolic hopper for another time, by simply lunching upon Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, which taps out at only 1320. Granted, there are 19 fewer milligrams of fat and 400-plus fewer milligrams of sodium in the salad, but the fact remains that greens aren’t always the better choice.
remember this guy?For example: Let’s say you have sworn off red meat, and have decided to make only fish and poultry your proteins of choice. You can stay with the chicken, and STILL do better than the Applebee’s Salad by eating two (TWO!) KFC Double Downs, the Holy Grail of Fast Food Sandwiches, which use a pair of fried chicken breasts as the “bun” to deliver its cheese and bacon payload. At 540 calories apiece, they’re damn near health food compared to the pecan-crusted roughage that is offered by America’s “Neighborhood Grill.” Plus, they’re only 80 mg more sodium each.
But if you’re going to “go there,” and have already decided that it’s only an additional 15 minutes on the elliptical machine to cover 200 extra calories, then you may as well go for the new burger at a Lebanese restaurant in Astoria, Queens, here in New York. They have put a Quarter Pound Bacon Cheeseburger on their menu, served on a halved, grilled, sugar-glazed donut. 
Cheeseburger DoughnutThis bears repeating.
They have put a Quarter Pound Bacon Cheeseburger on their menu, served on a halved, grilled, sugar-glazed donut.
Besides rendering your blood flow to the consistency of chocolate mousse, this burger is its own daily food allotment, even for the most calorically generous of diets. However, to its credit, it features turkey bacon in place of the non-halal friendly swine version.
Unfortunately, it does not yet have a name.
I submit the obvious:
The Widowmaker
Now THAT’S good eatin’.
