3 Surprising Ways Long Distance Relationships Indulge Your Inner Foodie

- April 03, 2018

LDRs are awesome and have some huge advantages over SDRs, and we know that, and some key LDR terms, after the enlightenment from 3 Reasons to Fall in Love Long Distance.

Even more awesome are some very unexpected and surprising ways that long distance brought us closer to food. That includes the super yummy avocado, pine nut, lime vinaigrette arugula salad as pictured above. The enlightenment continues!

# 1 You master the art of Food Grouponing.

JB hasn’t claimed this skill, but there is still time to work on that.

You want to take your person everywhere, and do everything, and still eat Portillo's every day.

The great JB confers. Maybe not everyday… but every trip. For sure.

But that comes at a price and premium, that groupon helps with so incredibly much. You become a saver, and one way to achieve that is Groupon. Thus, a Grouponer is born.

And… so is a Costco member (for those sweet local deals on restaurant gift cards)... Really, just an overall deal hunter.

We have scored deals on couples massages (with strawberries!), architectural tours (bar on board of course), fondue, and mystery dinners, in both of our cities.

This deal hunters are constantly seeking deals for fun good eats in our prospective areas, so if you find any of interest, let us know!

Which brings me to a pretty solid point on how your relationship with food changes…

#2 You become a solid candidate for Top Chef

I’ve talked about cooking together for dates, which is outrageously fun, and only sometimes frustrating, but cooking becomes increasingly necessary as the relationship continues.

JB and I see eachother once a month, but in many LDR circumstances, it is far less. In that glorious weekend you get to spend with the love of your life, you want to look your best.

Unfortunately, your best is not achieved through the accumulated Wendy’s frosties cups in the back seat of your car. I have fallen prey to this - I have the free Jr. frosty keychain, and it calls me in hardcore on my commute. Sadly, while their beef isn’t frozen, but it still lands on our hips the same way McDonald’s does.

In your effort to look as good as possible, and save a little moola on fast food or other fantastically delicious and caloric convenient options, you opt to cook at home more over time.

Eventually, you get to the point of spending four hours in the kitchen meal prepping Whole30 chili, sloppy joes, and fire-roasted spaghetti squash for the week. Or, you spend 3 hours carefully slicing, spreading, roasting, toasting, and perfectly placing food on platters for a paired wine tasting. Or that’s just us.

My attempt to impress with an at-home wine tasting.

Which more or less turned more into goat cheese on carbs, with a lot of white zinfandel.

But the delicious idea was there!

Either way, the process unto which you become an amateur chef has begun. You are spending more time practicing, for whatever motive is behind it, which ultimately improves your cooking skills.

Inevitably, when there is food, there are instagram posts...

#3 You become amateur food photographers

When your partner is miles away, everything gets transformed into a picture.

LDRs bring us back to Facebook circa 2010, sharing even the smallest details of your day with a quick snapshot to make the other feel included. This includes all of your food, together or apart, to prove your aforementioned cooking prowess, or just to make the other person jelly over your jicama coleslaw butternut squash turkey chili.

With time, your pictures get way better. You soon find yourself in a restaurant, rearranging the centerpieces, moving out of seats entirely, and sliding your plate just a little to the left, inch by inch, to get out of that sunspot ruining the light balance for that memory book of trips to remember for years to come.

The labor is intensive, but the results look fabulous, and tasty…