The Awesome Blossom

For any of you familiar with the restaurant chain, Chili's, you know the Awesome Blossom. In other restaurants it's called a "Blooming Onion" or an "Onion Blossom." Big, fried, and greasy, with a dipping sauce to dip your grease in.

So here I am on Sunday. It's 1 p.m., breakfast was at 6:45, and I'm hungry and on the road. So I head to Chili's, where I figure I can find something relatively harmless for lunch. Not in the mood for a bunless burger, so I hone in on the "Guiltless Grill" selections. Hey! They list carb counts! Let's see....95g, 80g, and here's a bland slab of salmon for 31g. Yuck.

So I pick out the fajitas instead, which I figure I'll eat without the tortilla. Seems a good selection. I check out the appetizers and then I spy it: the Awesome Blossom. How bad can it be, I ask myself rhetorically. After all, onions are a vegetable albeit high in naural sugars. It's not THAT heavily breaded, after all. I could scrape off some breading. And, besides, I'm not eating my tortillas.

So that's what I do. It was so greasy it made me swoon and the salt must have sent my blood pressure into the ozone. Pretty tasty, in other words. And then the fajitas came along and I was stuffed and happy.

Till I got home and went on the amazing website calorieking.com, which has a large selection of brand-name and restaurant nutritional info. First, I look up the fajitas, listed in the calorieking database with or without tortillas. 20 grams of carbs. Not bad, not bad, and I didn't even eat the guacamole, which I think looks and tastes like it must have come out of someone's nose. Gross but true.

Then I looked up the Awesome Blossom, and I learned why they call it awesome, and it has nothing to do with the taste. That would be: 2710 calories, 203 grams ft (36g saturated), 6360 mg sodium, 194 carbs (15g fiber) and 24g protein.

YIKES!!!!!!! And I ate half of the darned thing.

Okay, scratch yesterday. Start over today. Note to self: please check calorieking for your restaurant menu BEFORE you go, not after.