Fried pickle haiku

delightfully sour
breaded, dripping in garlic ranch
a slice of heaven

Foodie on the road

On Saturday I made one of those rare, beautiful stops at Elmo's in Carrboro, on the way out of town. It was a beautiful, sunny morning, and the wait was only about 20 minutes -- not bad for a Saturday at Elmo's.

Unfortunately, I made the mistake of ordering the cheese grits. I've gotten them before, and they aren't bad -- they just don't have the magic of, say, the sweet potato pancakes that I always eye but rarely get. Perhaps it's because they aren't the creamy magnificence of the grits at Bogart's, which likely have about 3,000 calories. So I suppose I should thank Elmo's for the slightly blander-but-healthier version of the Southern classic, non?

At least I had a biscuit. It was bliss: big and fluffy, toasted and buttered. It made me wish I had ordered the biscuits and gravy (plus the two dozen sides that come with). Regardless, I will never not have an excuse to visit Elmo's. I will defy spiking gas prices to get my fix, and cross my fingers that Elmo's opens a diner in Raleigh.*

Also, breakfast for two for $13. Who can beat that?**

____



*As much as I love Elmo's, I have to admit that the crunchy-granola vibe would be desperately out of place in a vaguely soulless Raleigh. *sigh*

** A rhetorical question. Fast-food breakfast deserves its own entry (or 10).

I can't get no satisfaction

Day: Thursday
Place: Work
Time: 5 p.m.

The culprit: Thai Kitchen's Pad Thai "noodle cart"

It's been a busy day -- so much so I didn't have time to forage for chocolate, as usual. So when I finally got around to opening my lunchbag (actually a recycled Sephora bag), I had high hopes that whatever I ate would be sustaining. I had two options: Campbell's Soup at Hand cream of broccoli, which tastes kind of like ass but is at least hot, and the pad thai, which I figured would have the added bonus of being mildly spicy.

I chose the pad thai, and got a hit of spice, but also gummy noodles, insubstantial sauce and a dearth of peanuts. I won't lie: I ate most of it. But it didn't come near to filling that gaping midday need.

I ignored the cream of broccoli and headed down to my local Vend-o-land, where I hoped to find something sweet but not ghastly, cheap but not indigestion-inducing. Unfortunately, the ice cream machine has been out of service for weeks, so my fallback ice cream sandwich -- which deserves an entry of its own -- was out of reach.

So I bought a 50-cent bag of Herr's Honey BBQ Potato Chips.

Lemme tell ya: They were gross. Generally I'm cool with barbecue chips. Lay's does a particularly good version: crispy, salty and tart-savory enough to pleasantly singe the inside of my mouth. These, however, were awful. Stale (despite the July expiration date), sickeningly sweet and generally nauseating.

Maybe it's time for me to lay off the convenience foods, y'all.

Barbecue blasphemy?

The new issue of Gourmet, which arrived in the mail a few days ago, has a feature on Eastern Carolina barbecue -- you know, the vinegar kind. For the record, I love that kind. When done well, it's savory with a lovely texture, complemented by a dollop of creamy slaw. Growing up in the Midwest, I ate no such thing. It was a pleasant surprise to a girl whose exposure to barbecue was limited to my mom's ground-turkey sloppy joes and Famous Dave's Kansas City-style tomato-based sauce.

Well, Gourmet figured out a way to not do justice to the regional phenomenon. They published pictures of beautiful young people at a picnic table -- New York models, no doubt -- chowing away on barbecue and its accoutrements -- as if any beautiful New York model would ever be caught dead putting something fried or pork-based in his or her mouth.

Furthermore, Gourmet just overdoes the food itself. They offer a range of recipes that, objectively speaking, look delicious. But they cross the line when they offer up a recipe for a homemade bun on which to put the barbecue.

Now, aside from the ideological objections to the simple existence of the bun that some might have, why do we need to go to all this trouble? We're already spending hours, theoretically, slow-cooking and seasoning the pig, making the slaw, assembling the 'nana pudding. Why add another time-consuming, unnecessary step to the process when a storebought, smooshy, carbolicious bun will do the trick?

This post is my homage to Smithfield's, a fairly recent discovery with locations scattered across central and Eastern N.C. I worship its unpretentious style and straightforward delivery. Hats off to you, Smithfield's. Stay your very own nonhighfalutin' self.

Missin' out

Either my head was somewhere else, or this was badly promoted. Regardless, it's a good idea -- that I hope to take advantage of next year.

Food, food and more food

When poverty strikes

Normally Sunday afternoon is a time of impromptu decadence. It's an afternoon off, and the lazy Sunday ethos calls.

But money is beginning to mean something different, for a variety of reasons including but not limited to the prospect of $4-a-gallon gas, so Sunday lunch (or "dinner," if you're a Midwesterner) was Zaxby's.

Zaxby's is, in general, awesome. The fries are well seasoned, and the house dipping sauce is awesome. Moreover, you will find two things there you can't find many other places: Texas toast, dripping with butter, and cherry soda. For $6 a head, what more could you want?

There was one hitch, though -- our order was up so quickly it was clear our plates weren't cooked to order, which has been up to this point one of Zaxby's selling points. Usually the food is piping hot and fresh from the fryer. This time it was hot-ish. And thus it was good-ish. Not fabulous. But passable for a coupla hungry Sunday-afternoon lie-abouts.

Sunday dinner was homemade: Granny Lawson's Lunch Dish (from "Nigella Bites") and a box of Krusteaz lemon bars. And a bottle of bad wine. It was still a good meal.

A Saturday afternoon quickie

Artsplosure.

Let's acknowledge the obvious: major crowds, traffic jams of human and vehicle varieties, long lines, spendy food.

Then, let's take a moment to acknowledge the sublime: people-watching, downtown revitalization at work, funky arty stuff, good music.

The food wasn't too bad, either, though I kind of cheated. I was meeting a friend and we wanted to sit and talk and *try* to avoid the lines. So we went to El Rodeo at City Market. Mexican that's cheap, hot and fast. *insert crude joke here* I got a beef enchilada; it tasted like a beef enchilada. No surprises there. We were so busy talking I forgot about the delicious guac until afterward, when I exploded in a flurry of guac haste -- dipping it off my plate with the remaining chips as fast as I could, lest a zealous bus person snatch my plate away in a busy-day frenzy.

The best part of the meal was the salsa, delivered as usual in a mini carafe. It was spicier than usual, with a wonderful consistency -- not too watery, not too chunky. My mouth did a small victory dance.

Then, it was on to the fair food. I only partook of a lemon cream crepe, which was worth the short wait. It was served in a folded piece of waxed paper with a napkin, and it was h-o-t. But the lemon was the lemon I desired, a lemon curd-like filling. The cream wasn't so evident. The crepe itself was light and crusty and lovely.

Finally, we ended up at Crema on Fayetteville Street, where my companion wanted a milkshake but changed her mind when we started perusing the Cold Stone-style ice cream menu. Two flavors of ice cream, a few dozen mix-ins. The counter folk were harried and none too pleased by the crowd, it seemed, but hey, it was an ice cream kind of day. I got vanilla with brownie and toffee bits mixed in. It was cold creamy perfection.

And with that, I was stuffed.