A chicken strip basket review? At a pizza place? Unheard of.
Yeah, there’s a reason for that.
For Basket Review 35 I braved the cold, snow and unbearable wind that Fargo-Moorhead so kindly offered this Saturday morning to bring you this unprecedented blog about food. You’re welcome. And thank you very much for being here. Much love.
Was it worth it? No.
These were the exact same chicken strips I ate a couple miles west at Burger Time. I feel like I could buy them in the frozen food section at any grocery store.
It’s not like the strips were gross, they just weren’t the highest quality and were boring. They also were inconsistently crispy, but again, they didn’t taste bad.
The fries had a nice crisp and were fluffy on the inside. They could’ve used a bit more salt. I could tell both the strips and fries were fresh out of the fryer, which I appreciated. The ranch was pretty standard. It was fine.
This basket was about the same as Burger Time. The fries were slightly better though, so I’ll give this a 5.2 (Burger Time was a 5.1).
What I will say, is that this was a good bang-for-your-buck meal. The chicken strips dinner came with five strips, a heaping pile of fries and a trip to the salad bar. After all that, I was out $9.22 after tax.
The ambiance of Duane’s was intriguing and unexpected. I felt like I was eating at a Minnesota lakeside restaurant. There was no lake in sight.
The service was top-notch, so thank you for that, Duane’s.
My drive home is where this took an awful turn that derailed my entire day.
Due to the closure of a major intersection that allows me to get from south Moorhead to north Moorhead, I had to take an alternate route. (The City of Moorhead decided it was a good idea to start work on a year-long underpass project A MONTH BEFORE THE START OF WINTER … Ha! Nice one. Unreal).
ANYWHO, I figured the fastest route was to take the southbound one-way (11th Street) from Center Avenue to 12th Avenue South. So I turn onto 11th and there’s a train.
OK, whatever. It’s (unfortunately) happened to me a thousand times before. The train is moving fast and I have some great songs queued up in my Spotify. This is fine.
So the eastbound train goes through after about two minutes of waiting. Not bad at all. The arms with the flashing lights (I’m sure there’s a better term for this, but idk) that go down to prevent traffic from driving onto the tracks, however, are not going up.
Well, after a couple minutes of waiting for the stupid arms to go up so I can move on with my day and write this blog, ANOTHER TRAIN COMES THROUGH.
Yup. Immediately after an eastbound train passes, another one comes through on the westbound tracks. Not like I want to spend my day doing something other than waiting for a stupid train to figure its life out.
BUT IT GETS BETTER.
This one stops. Comes to a complete halt right in front of my face, mocking me (probably) and my disapproval of the F-M trains. Sigh.
Thankfully, everyone in front of me was fed up and we started a movement to cut through the parking lot to our right to find an alternate route (a second alternate route for me, mind you).
So after I had to take a different way to go around the road closure, I had to make an additional reroute to escape the wrath of the trains.
What a bunch of bullshit. 5.2.
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