cookout Archives - Queen of the Food Age

Quote of the Week 5/28/12

May 28, 2012

Happy Memorial Day! Sorry this post was so delayed. I’ve been in a food coma for a few weeks, recovering from all the food my mother made for Memorial Day weekend festivities.

Saturday night we went to dinner downtown Greenville at Pomegranate, a Persian restaurant. Who knew Greenville was worldly enough to have a Persian restaurant? I sure didn’t. But it was amazing. I’m sure I’ll be reviewing it at some point, so keep checking back!

Sunday, we celebrated Sean and Ben’s birthdays in the usual fashion: Tina made way more food than any normal human would be able to consume, and we all ate too much and drank too much and stayed up til the wee hours of the night. It was great. My dad smoked a pork butt in his new smoker (insert requisite butt joke here), and grilled hot dogs. Tina made this fruit dip from cool whip, vanilla pudding, and amaretto which was absolutely divine. I didn’t even bother with the fruit, I just kept using a spoon. She also made grape tomatoes stuffed with goat cheese (which I kept stuffing into my face), caprese bites, some kind of veggie dip and a bunch of vegetables, bread-wrapped asparagus with blue cheese, cheese dip and chips from the mexican restaurant, cold cuts, cupcakes, a cotton candy vodka sponge cake, cookies, and other various desserts and foodstuffs. There was also beer galore, and different flavored margaritas being made throughout the night.

Needless to say, I woke up Monday morning feeling like I’d been hit by train. It’s a good thing it was a holiday so I didn’t feel so bad about lounging around in sweatpants for the remainder of the day. For lunch we went to Logan’s Roadhouse (the one where you throw peanuts on the floor) where, for some reason, I thought it was a good idea to order cheese fries, and spent the rest of the day feeling even worse than when I’d woken up. And of course, that was when my mom decided it would be a good idea to go to the mall to look for bathing suits. I bought 3.

This week’s food quote comes from George Bernard Shaw and I think it pretty much sums up my thoughts about this weekend.

“There is no love sincerer than the love of food.”
–George Bernard Shaw

I need someone to remind me how to breathe. My stomach’s so full I seem to have forgotten how.

Restaurant Reviews

Heroes Sports Bar and Grill

April 6, 2012

This past week I had the pleasure of spending a few days on Dauphin Island, Alabama with Lauren. We basically ate nothing, drank beer, and lounged in the sunlight for three glorious days. Toward the end of our trip, when we were hungry, hungover, and sunburnt, we started hallucinating visions of cheeseburgers, and attempted to figure out how to use a grill in order to cook for ourselves. Unfortunately, neither of us have any knowledge of how to use a gas grill, and somehow managed to spray propane on the porch, which I’m pretty sure is a fire hazard.

Appendix A: What I was convinced was going to happen if I continued my attempt to turn on the grill.

Knowing we would be driving home the following day, we decided we would stop in Mobile to have the burger we’d been craving for a week. Our final night at the beach was spent thinking we were going to die from what I was convinced was a hurricane (but what turned out to be only a thunderstorm), and fighting to find enough cell phone reception to research what restaurants in Mobile (if any) had good cheeseburgers. I was able to stumble onto a blog entry highlighting the 19 Burgers To Eat Before You Die centered around Southern Alabama. Although I appreciate the variety of choices in the blog, I wish he would have just named his favorite and saved me a bunch of work. Since I’m lazy and got frustrated trying to contort my body in ways that would allow me to get cell phone service, I just decided to go with the first burger joint on the list, Heroes Sports Bar & Grill.

I STILL ONLY HAVE ONE BAR. DAMN YOU, VERIZON!

Now I don’t know if it’s because it was overcast, so no one was really walking around downtown, but Mobile seemed kind of creepy when we were driving around. On the walk to the restaurant Lauren and I were picking out what items we could use as weapons, just in case we had unwittingly stumbled into the zombie apocalypse. When we entered Heroes, we were a little unnerved by the fact that it was packed with people. And by “people,” I mean “men…” nary a lady in sight (other than our waitress, that is).

Apparently they’d already eaten all the womenfolk.

After we sat down and perused the menu, Lauren got really excited by the fact that they had fried pickles on the menu. They also had a lot of really good looking appetizers, like spinach and crawfish dip, mexican egg rolls, and waffle cut sweet potato fries. If I’d been with more people, I would have ordered another appetizer to try it, but I know Lauren would never eat any of the appetizers I wanted. We were a little disappointed when the fried pickles turned out to be fried pickle spears instead of pickle chips. They’re just so much harder to eat that way. They stay molten lava hot for about 45 minutes, and the breading falls off when you try to eat it, so you just end up getting third degree burns on your tongue from a pickle.

Try explaining that injury to your mother.

For my meal, I got the Hero Burger with American cheese and bacon. The burgers are served with 2 sides, so I got French Fries (don’t tell Jesus!) and baked beans. The burger was really great. It was thick, and tasted like it just came off of a grill. The only thing I had a problem with was that there was just way too much bread, which kind of took away from the flavor of the beef and overpowered the burger as a whole. But I did like that they supplied a generous helping of toppings (two slices of tomato, onions, lettuce, etc). The bacon was the perfect level of crunchiness. It was a really good burger, but by no means the best I’ve ever had. The fries were crinkle cut (my favorite) and delicious. The beans tasted homemade and were a perfect complement to the burger. Basically, I overindulged and enjoyed every minute of it.

“X” marks the spot where I’m going to start shoveling food into my face.

Lauren got basically the same thing as me, only she (of course) got a salad as her side instead of anything fun or flavorful. The salad looked basically like one of those ready-pack salad mixes with iceberg lettuce and shredded cabbage. They threw on a couple of pieces of vegetables and some croutons to make it seem like something other than rabbit food, but there was really no disguising it (props for trying, though). But, that’s what you get for ordering a salad from a sports bar.