1/21/08 High on the Hog

Ya'll, you will be shocked to learn that even though it was bitterly, bitterly cold this weekend, there was no snow. That's right. I know this is hard to believe, but the weather man was wrong! (gasps!) Not one teeny little drop of snow. Not that I particularly like snow, but if it's going to be minus 40 bazillion degrees, then we might as well get some snow out of it. It's only fair that we have something to obsess over while our eyeballs freeze into tiny eyeball ice cubes. (Not that my eyeballs were freezing because I was smart enough to stay wrapped up under the blankets in my pjs all weekend. But you know other people's eyeballs may not have been so lucky). Anyway. No snow.

You know what? I take that back. I did go out this weekend. Tony and I went to Famous Dave's on Saturday night. Famous Dave's is a barbecue place out around the Cedar Bluff section of K-town. I'm not a huge barbecue fan, so I never gave it much thought, but Tony's loves the stuff, plus we had a coupon for it in that school coupon book thing that we bought, so why not? I exchanged my woolly socks, blue flannel pajama pants and orange sweatshirt with more than a few paint stains on it for woolly socks, jeans and a fairly clean shirt, and off we went to Famous Dave's.

If you go between 5:30 and 6pm, there's not really a wait at all. And like any good barbecue place, the whole restaurant positively oozed Eau de Smoked Hickory Chips. (I swear that it must be a Glade plug-in scent called Smokehouse, because all these places smell exactly the same).

Anyway, they led us back to a tiny booth surrounded by duck hunting paraphernalia, where we settled in to have a romantic date night dinner with just the two of us...and about 50 wooden duck decoys suspended above our heads. (I was worried about how secure the duck decoys were. I could just imagine my battered body being rolled out on a gurney while the 6:00 news anchor stood just behind me saying something like "Duck decoys take revenge by flattening local woman...details at 11". Even if you survive, you just don't live that kind of stuff down). Anyway, while I suspiciously eyeballed the Duck Decoys of Death, Tony was drooling over the menu. Apparently there's a meal that contains so much food that they serve it on a trashcan lid as the plate. (I sincerely hope it's a new trashcan lid and not ones that they actually use). It comes with like, 24 lbs of cow, half a pig, an entire roasted chicken, slaw, corn bread muffins, baked beans, corn cobettes, and a partridge in a pear tree. Tony's eyes glazed over at the mere thought, and I think he started whimpering, but I brought him back to earth with a quick jab of the Duck Decoy of Reality. There's no possible way someone could eat all that. I'm no expert, but I think single-handedly stuffing down 4 or 5 farm animals can be bad for digestion. As it was, Tony ended up ordering only half a cow and one side of pig, and I got the salad (which totally got a dismissive sniff from the waiter. Yeah well, it just so happens that I LIKE salad. And much more than getting covered in sauce as I rip the flesh off the bones of animals with my teeth. That's just a little too Conan the Barbarian for my tastes. To each his own, Mr. Waiter). As it turned out, Mr. Waiter's dismissive sniffing was way premature. This salad was HUGE! Like, a family-sized bowl of salad. If Tony was working his way through eating all the farm animals, I was mowing through about 500 acres worth of lettuce. And tomatoes. And carrots. And cheese. And chicken tenders. I ate and ate and ate and still couldn't make a dent in it. I could have done the backstroke through that salad bowl. Tony's bowl was equally impressive, only filled with the meaty ribs of some unidentified animal instead of lettuce. And unlike me, Tony has no qualms about ripping flesh from bone with his teeth, because he dug right in. To top it off, Famous Dave had thoughtfully included 5 types of sauce at each table, so Tony wasted no time trying each one. (He highly recommends Texas pit, Georgia mustard, and Sweet and Zesty). He would squeeze some sauce out, run a rib through it, slurp the meat off the bone, and close his eyes and sigh like he'd never been happier in his life. It was like realizing that you've died and ended up in Tony's version of heaven somehow.

In the end, after every sauce was slurped and rib ruminated, Tony, stuffed completely full of pig and cow and slaw and cornbread, and me, packed with roughage and Tony's stolen corn cobette, and toting a to-go box with another 50 lbs of leftover salad, rolled ourselves out to the car and headed for home- content to climb back into our warm cozy pjs and snooze on the couch.

Because barbecued farm animals are one of the few things on the planet that are worth risking frozen eyeballs for.