Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

I would bring an innocuous sandwich (turkey, cucumbers, spinach, roasted peppers and a dab of pesto on whole wheat is my current fix!).

to prevent sandwich crumbs/ick, take a piece of parchment paper. place sanwich in center. pull left and right side of paper to center and roll, cinching the sandwich in, then tuck the up&down side under the sandwich. slice the sandwich in half and pack. when you eat it, only touch the paper (peel down to eat the sandwich) to keep the ickies off your budget/hands.

apple slices with a toothpick or a banana are great accompaniments, as is a cup of yogurt. frozen grapes are also delish.

either during -- don't pretend you've never wanted to use "I think I left my wallet in the coat check" and the element of surprise. text messages are excellent for maintaining discretion and composure.

or after. there's nothing sexier than the moment when you touch the other person's arm and they realize "wait, we're going home to... score!". and then welcome to the world's longest train ride.

although, eliot spitzer, I wouldn't try to put multiple moves on your wife just yet. the 10-course meal is consolation prize enough.

frozen broccoli, punjab spinach sauce, cheap tofu, cheap brie, mixed sixpacks of beer (if you're a ratebeers.com addict like i am, this is clutch), relatively good inexpensive organic/free range meats, precut veggies, greek yogurt, larabars, pound plus belgian chocolate, almond milk, I must be forgetting something.

be warned, they will discontinue at least 1 or 2 things you fall in love with (mint hot chocolate? chicken masala bowl? shirataki noodles? tagine sauce? oh the heartbreak!). trader joes will tear out your heart, but you'll keep coming back for more...

chocolate.

i know. i'm not human.

truffle risotto a few years ago at Tony's in St. Louis. Oh. My. God.

I'm a Philadelphia native, so I'd take off my right arm for a yuengling...

but now I live in Beer Capitol, USA aka St. Louis, MO.

Despite AB, there's a bunch of great small craft breweries around. My favorite right now is O'Fallon -- their smoked porter is a "beer that drinks like a meal". It's not the beer to drink if you're going drinking all night, but it's a fantastic sensory experience. Their 5-day IPA is also wonderful.

Square One Brewery makes some good food and the beer ain't too bad either.

scrambled eggs with spinach (frozen) and slightly caramelized onion, with some spicy salsa and toast.

I wasn't a big veggie eater as a kid, so my mom made the rule that I had to eat as many pieces of veggie (piece of lettuce, broccoli, whatever) as I was old in year, plus one. Like birthday candles. Of course, I loved when we had peas, because 8 peas is barely a forkful. We also were not given "options" as kids; if you didn't want to eat what was on the table, you didn't get to eat at all. We were allowed to have dessert after dinner if we "still had room".

I think having a healthy attitude towards food is an important value to pass on to your kids -- my parents let us have anything we wanted, in moderation. They made us pack our own lunches starting in 1st grade (with supervision) and learn how to cook a decent number of meals before we left 'the nest'. We weren't allowed to order from kid's menus except at fast-food or chain restaurants that we would go to on our annual road trip to Cape Cod, back in the day before GPS, ChowHound or the internet. I remember going to Indian buffets before I could see over the steam tables! We lived in a city, so it was pretty easy to expose us to a wide variety of cuisines; even when we were elementary-school aged our parents would take us to fairly nice restaurants and let us order whatever we wanted.

Safe to say, I'm obsessed with the sensory experience of food and food in general. I even work in food; I'm a chemical engineer and I work in food technology. I literally get paid to cook every day, with some science thrown in. Would I have gotten this job if the parents hadn't encouraged appreciation of food? Nope. In my initial interview, one of the panel members asked if I'd be willing to bake (most of the testing I do is on baked goods and leavening products) and I almost fell out of my chair in excitement.