The SLY Foodie

Due to intense pressure from a certain blog groupie, I am writing this post on the food that I enjoyed during my stay at the Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center two months ago when Daniel was born. Contrary to popular belief, hospital food can be quite tasty, and they'll give you everything you check off on the menu, which is nice.

Since Daniel was born at 6 a.m., breakfast was the first meal I had. That morning, the nurses took the liberty of getting me a biscuit, some bacon, eggs, cereal, juice, a banana, milk and a couple of other things I don't remember. The bacon was good – crunchy and not salty. Granted, the eggs were a little bland, but they exceeded expectations. After all, the food's coming from a hospital kitchen, not a four-star Michelin restaurant. For lunch, I had beef stew served with a corn muffin, chicken noodle soup, fruit jello and an oatmeal raisin cookie (pictured below on the left). Everything tasted great, I would probably just add more seasoning to the beef stew though.
For dinner, we were treated to the hospital’s celebration dinner. After all, a new baby is a very good reason to celebrate. We were given a choice of shrimp or sirloin steak, so naturally one of us chose steak and the other chose shrimp. Both were served with rice pilaf, steamed vegetables, a garden salad, a dinner roll, dessert (which I don’t remember what it was) and sparkling cider. Again, the food was well prepared. I think the vegetables may have been slightly overcooked and could have used a little seasoning. Other than that, I think we were just hungry, tired and emotional to notice anything else. Unfortunately, that also meant that we forgot to take a picture of the food.

Breakfast the next day brought a pancake, a blueberry muffin, eggs, bacon, toast, cereal, a banana, juice and milk. No complaints there. No pictures, either. For lunch, I chose halibut because it was my second favorite fish (after Chilean sea bass, of course). That was served with squash and peas. My tray also included peaches, vanilla custard, fruit jello, toast and a salad. The fish was good, it didn’t taste fishy at all. Once again, however, I thought the vegetables were overcooked and needed salt. But I figure that most people in hospitals can’t necessarily have too much salt in their diet, thus blander tasting food.