Serena & I, we hadn’t seen each other for at least 3 years, so this particular lunch was far more about talking than eating.  With that in mind, here’s what we needed in a location:

• Cavernous interior (so that if we sat there for hours no one would care)
• Good food at a good price (since it was not all about the food)
• Huge comfy booth (so we could languish for hours in comfort)
• Attentive enough servers to keep us topped up in drinks but otherwise pretty much leave us alone (so we wouldn’t keep getting interrupted)

One place sprung immediately to mind:  Claim Jumper.  Great choice, friend.  All of the above plus ridiculous desserts.

I only ever have one thing to eat at Claim Jumper.  I know what I am going to have before I even get there.  Every time.  I always check the menu though…just to make sure that it’s still there.  And it always is.

Liver.

Hey, I’m a Brit.  We think eating offal is not only super tasty, but also totally cool.  And incidentally, extremely nutritious.  For reasons entirely unbeknown to me, America has not yet caught onto this & is still holding back on embracing any kind of offal-fest, so a fine plate of liver is hard to find.  But at Claim Jumper it is right there, slap bang in the middle of the menu.  Liver rocks.  I love liver.

The plate, when it comes, is brimming with food.  Swathes of thinly sliced, sauteed liver, mounds of gently fried onions, strips of thick, juicy apple-wood smoked bacon, a huge dollop of mashed potatoes, ladlefuls of brown gravy & several pounds of perfectly cooked vegetables.  Who’d have thought that a chain such as Claim Jumper would be an authority on veggie-cooking?  They are.  Those line-chefs know how to cook veggies.  Perfectly.  The biscuit?  Could totally do with out that.  More liver, more mash, more veggies or quite simply….just no biscuit.

 My long lost friend had some Californian chicken salad.  It looked good, actually, but why on earth would you eat salad when you could eat liver?

We talked for hours.  We laughed a lot.  And then we decided we had to have a ridiculous dessert each.  So we did.

That’s a Homemade Heathbar Chocolate Chip Cookie a la mode.  Billed as a “mini” it was almost as big as my friend’s face.  Every bite was gone in fairly short order though so I have to assume it was good, or at least highly comforting to mouth, mind & stomach.

 My dessert was also billed as a “mini”.  Ridiculous.  It was a regular-sized sundae in a regular-sized sundae glass.  Anything bigger would have been fatal.  I had issues with my sundae.  It was put together all wrong.  They poured all the hot fudge sauce into the bottom, then piled the ice cream on top and then finished the whole thing off with a gigantic squirt of whipped cream.  How I am supposed to eat it as a sundae?  First I had to eat my way through spoon after spoon of whipped cream, which, however yummy whipped cream is, it’s better WITH something.  Then I got the ice cream and then I got the hot fudge.  I wanted to eat all three things at the same time in the same spoonful.  People – build your sundaes better!  Thanks.

I love maraschino cherries.  I confess I really don’t even know what they are.  (OK, I just read up on maraschino cherries & now I wish I didn’t know what they were.)  I do know I could eat an entire jar in one sitting, and have done that in the past.  Yeah, one of those catering ones from Costco.  (Now I know what I know I won’t be doing that ever again.  Ignorance can be bliss.)

My friend & I had a perfectly lovely time of it all.  Yum.  Will I go to Claim Jumper again?  I absolutely will.  Anytime I need a liver fix or 3 hours of talk time with a great friend over some good food, I’ll be there.  The 15 %discount with the PrimeCard is nice too :-)  Thanks Claim Jumper.