Dinner can be an event when you have it somewhere besides your dining room. When you go to a familiar restaurant, you tend to take comfort in the fact that the food will (almost) always be excellent. When you go to a restaurant you’ve never patronized, it can be an adventure as you try the cuisine and decide if you want to come back again and again.

My sweetheart and I enjoy going out when we can. It doesn’t happen too often, but when we it does, there are two things you can count on.

First, we will eat.

Second, we will snap photos of our food with us sitting behind it and post it on social media.

I’m not quite sure how it started or why it started, but we’ve made sure that before we dig in, we break out our cellphones, snap photos of the food and the other person, swap phones and do it all again. Sometimes we post during the meal, and other times we show enough restraint to wait until we get home before we show off what we enjoyed.

It’s something that plenty of people do now that we have social media to show off every aspect of our lives—at least every aspect where we keep our clothes on. However, dinner photos on the internet also seem to tick some people off. They ask why on earth people find it necessary to post images of every meal they eat.

At least I’ve managed to keep it down to a slow burn with only showcasing our “date nights,” and I think it’s because we only step out on occasion, so it’s fun for us to chronicle going to new places or the same old places and let the mouth watering food make our friends and acquaintances hungry.

I know, with Facebook, you get constant reminders of your “memories,” all the stuff you posted in the distant past, and it’s becoming more common to see the imagery of food and my sweetheart smiling big as a delicious meal sits on a nice, clean plate and is arranged much better than I could ever deal with a home-cooked meal.

Believe me, I’ve tried. There have been a number of times I’ve taken photos of my limited specialties—baked macaroni and cheese, as well as breakfast burritos with eggs, cheese and bacon—but I think having restaurant lighting makes a difference somehow. Don’t ask me to explain it.

Our latest night out was on a Friday, which in Wisconsin translates to fish fry night. That wasn’t something I ran into on a regular basis growing up in Arizona, but in Wisconsin, every Friday is a night for fish, hearkening back to when the Catholics go through Lent and couldn’t have meat on Fridays, but the animal flesh of fish is permitted.

I digress.

We went to one of our favorite places, The Hungry Bear, in Bonduel. Lately, we’ve been going there on Fridays because our other Bonduel haunt, The Lumberyard, tends to get jam-packed if you don’t get there before four o’clock.

On this particular night, we took notice of the blackboard on the wall—yes, they still have those in some restaurants—listing rainbow trout as a special for $16.95 with all the trimmings like rye bread, cole slaw and your choice of potato. For some reason, I ordered the smelt basket, but when I saw the rainbow trout being delivered, I felt a twinge of regret that I didn’t order it instead of the safe dish of smelt. Oops.

Of course, seeing two delicious rainbow trout filets meant that it was time for the sacrificed fishies to get their 15 minutes of fame or whatever amount it is now due to inflation. They made for a beautiful picture as bright sunshine illuminated the restaurant, and then we started to eat.

During the meal, I noticed my sweetheart wasn’t eating the skin of his rainbow trout. He claimed you’re not supposed to, but I guess I’m being naughty. He has a point in that the trout potentially has absorbed pollutants into the skin, and then we ingest those same pollutants at our peril. However, if the trout came to maturity in a clean environment like a fish hatchery, rainbow trout skin can be rich in omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin D and protein.

The question might have come regardless of whether we snapped a picture of it prior to eating, but it’ll be a meal we remember just because we took a few moments to trade phones and snap photos of our food. Let the detractors poo-poo the matter, but the photos aren’t really for their entertainment anyway. If you want to shoot photos of your food, go right ahead. It’ll be some good memories down the line.