The Girl Who Ate Everything

A bunch of stuff happened since I went to Honolulu. Because that was three months ago. Yeah. To summarize things, I present you with five-ish of the most memorable places I digested stuff in May.

Motorino

Motorino.

Serious Eats won a James Beard award back in May. I don't think I mentioned it here, but if you read Serious Eats (and you should!), you already heard the news. YAY WOOT rock.

So we had to throw a party. And a Serious Eats-style party means reserving Motorino in Brooklyn for a night of pizza partying and packing in as many Serious Eats contributors and friends as we could.

Chicken wings.

The fire-roasted chicken wings were awesome, and I say that as someone who isn't that into chicken wings. Thin, crisp skin + juicy meat = success! Unfortunately, I don't know if they're serving them now since I don't see it on the menu and this meal happened almost three months ago. :(

Fried chicken = yay!

If I hadn't moved out of South Williamsburg at the end of 2008, I would've only been a 10 minute walk from Pies 'n' Thighs, the beloved Southern food joint that opened in 2006, closed abruptly in January 2008 with plans to reopen later that year, and then, two years later, finally reopened on March 1, 2010, in a new, larger location.

As I had never been to the original location, I didn't feel the burning need to visit the new incarnation of Pies 'n' Thighs upon immediate application of clean, non-sleepwear clothing. (I just realized that this may only make sense to me because I'm wearing pajamas right now. I'm usually wearing clean, non-sleepwear clothing. ...Pinky swear.) But judging from the excitement and reviews of the food-loving [SOCIAL MEDIA ALERT] Twitterverse and blogosphere [/SOCIAL MEDIA ALERT], I should've been ready to run over all plodding grandmas and napping puppies that lay in my path (yes, this path is paved with old people and helpless heart meltingly-cute animals, for some reason) to get to New York City's latest outpost of fried-chicken-and-pie greatness. My high expectations were lowered when a close food-loving source described the food as just okay, and the service as a bit sloppy. But I still wanted to try it...eventually.

I finally made it over on May 27. With the help of Janet's malleable stomach, I tried their fried pickles, burger, fried chicken, mac and cheese, and biscuit. And it was all good.

The fried chicken box comes with three pieces of brined deep fried chicken*, a hefty biscuit, and one side. It's a great deal for $11, especially when you consider that it could be split between two people with normal appetites and leave room for dessert. If you eat more than that you'll likely enter the "food coma" stage. Which is what happened to Janet and me.

This is what I would look like if I were a blob creature.

Last Tuesday after visiting the new BK Whopper Bar near Times Square and sampling four Whoppers (...it's...it's just part of my job), I thought I was done eating for the day. Calorie-wise, I'm sure I was.

Not that I ever count calories—I hypothesize in a highly unscientific manner that the only reason my body hasn't converted those thousands of excess calories I ingest on a regular basis into pillowy folds of fat that could engulf a puppy is because I'm ignorant of exactly how many calories I eat. If the brain doesn't know it, the body doesn't show it. (...Yeah, I know this isn't true; I just wanted to rhyme.) All I know is that I ate a bite of Whopper here, and there, and a part of a sandwich, and maybe some spoonfuls of ice cream, and maybe some other stuff I don't really remember. Since I didn't think I was going out for dinner that night, I tucked into an extra slice of the newfangled giant Pizza Burger. Bad move, Robyn. Bad. Move.

It didn't take long for every burp to taste like Whopper, and by "Whopper" I mean sort of fake smoke-y meatstuff. It wasn't the most terrible burp-flavor ever or anything, but it wasn't as nice as, say, post-Hill Country barbecue burps replete with slow, gently smoked, deeply beefy and porky goodness.

When Greg had asked me earlier if I wanted to go out to eat, I declined because I was full of Whopper and thought it would be cruel to tax my stomach juices any further. But when the burps became too much, giving me the sensation that my brain/body was transforming into a limp meat patty, I texted Greg to say, "CHANGED MY MIND, LET'S GET BURGERS AT VESELKA PLZ." (That wasn't the exact message; I don't text in all caps. But in my mind that's what it sounded like.)