Interesting to note that if they hadn't cancelled WonderCon, I would have been down in Anaheim right now getting ready to mingle with tens of thousands of people all weekend. (Well, actually I wouldn't have gone and neither would anyone else with a lick of sense in their well-masked heads.)
Not much has changed where I am. I'm sleeping odd hours, which is what you tend to do when you have no appointments to be anywhere and no plans to leave your house.
Hey, I'm usually not a fan of chain Italian restaurants but I like Maggiano's Little Italy, which has 52 locations throughout 22 states and the District of Columbia. The one near me is my third-favorite place to eat pasta in Los Angeles…and for those of you who care, my favorite is this place and my second-fave is this place.
But Maggiano's is fine. They have this deal…when you dine-in and have one of their "classic pastas" (spaghetti, lasagna, baked ziti, etc.), they give you a free extra classic pasta (unheated) to take home with you. This is for those folks who have dinner there and think they might need a second dinner to eat on the way home. But I guess you could put it in your refrigerator and reheat it a day or two later.
With my reduced-sized, gastric-bypassed stomach, I find that one serving of Maggiano's pasta is two meals for me. Ergo, if I order one there, I eat half and take half home along with my bonus entree…and voila! One order becomes four meals!
Now, of course, no one can dine-in at the one near me now but they have a thriving delivery service and it offers some great deals, one being that they'll give you five of their unheated, ready-for-the-microwave classic pastas for $40. So I got the equivalent of ten meals for that price. I also got one order (two breasts) of their fine chicken parmesan for $20 and used another deal they have where you can get a second portion of the same thing for five bucks more.
Each order of the chicken comes with a side of spaghetti marinara…so for $65 plus tax and delivery fees and tip, I got what for me is twelve servings of pasta (twelve!) and four of chicken parm, plus they threw in enough of their wonderful bread that I won't eat a third of it before it goes stale. I froze a lot of the pasta and gave some of it to my cleaning lady.
If you live within delivery range of a Maggiano's, check this out. With the hassle and delays of getting groceries delivered in some areas, you might feel better just to have a refrigerator full of fully-prepared, microwave-ready food and this is a not-exorbitant way to achieve that.