DennisPillion.com

Birmingham Restaurant Week, or How I learned to stop worrying and buy bigger pants

Ahh, Birmingham Restaurant Week. You came and went too quickly.

For 10 glorious days, restaurant-goers in one of the fattest states in America could gorge themselves on much better food.

We were still giving ourselves diabetes, but a much higher class of diabetes; the kind of diabetes that knows which fork to use first in restaurants like Bottega and makes snide remarks about English majors.

For $30, $20, or $10, average Joes could wander into the finest restaurants in Birmingham and walk out stuffed with three courses of goodness. Here's part one of the rundown on my extended week of gluttony:

Crafting the perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich (and no, it isn't frozen)

I was in Aldi the other day when I stumbled upon these modern marvels of engineering. That's right, folks, there is actually a company out there that manufactures and sells frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Really? Who's buying this stuff? Moms who would like to prepare food for their families, but are too busy to open two jars and a bag of bread? Wouldn't it take even longer to unfreeze one of these than to spread the condiments on two pieces of bread?

Not to mention that you lose all semblance of creativity that goes along with making your own PB&J sandwich. What's that? You don't see how making PB&J can be creative? Well, good thing I'm here to set you straight.

Good Friday lunch thoughts

Nothing hits the spot on a meat-free Good Friday lunch than the vegan chili over at The Bottletree Cafe. Sitting at the bar, though, it was more than bean-and-cheesy goodness that assailed my senses.It was a sudden onset of generational identity crisis.

On one TV, the newscasters were talking about North Korea increasing its capacity for enrichment of nuclear materials. The flatscreen on my right was showing a DVD of The Muppets take Manhatten. And I was reading Bill Bryson's "The Lost Continent," a rambling but extremely humorous look at why the United States in 1988 (when the book was written) was so much worse than the United States was in the 1950s, when he grew up.

So I was reading about how much Bryson misses home milk delivery, hearing about Kim Jong Il inching closer to being able to destroy our planet, while watching puppets run and roller skate through Central Park.

My new school year's resolution: end low-carb diets

Published: Thursday, August 26, 2004 in The Crimson White

The great Steve Martin once said that it's important to set a series of small, manageable goals if you want to change something. That way you don't get discouraged, and you can see when you achieve something. Steve's goals were, first, to be the all-being master of space, time and dimension. His second goal was to go to Europe.

In keeping with the spirit of Steve, I have decided to set a small, manageable goal to positively change the world at the dawn of this new school year.

This year's resolution: I will put an end to the immensely annoying fad of low-carb diets. Thousands of people across the country are trading in their bread and vegetables for steak and bacon, and it's high time somebody put a stop to it.