Ahhh...Memories...

I have so much that I want to write about that I don’t know where to begin: my first trip to Arthur Avenue in the Bronx (the Real Little Italy of NYC), the return of one of my favorite shows from middle school, my sixth treatment (only two more to go!), the cookies I made yesterday…but instead, I want to reflect on one of the highlights from 2007.

I was cleaning out the memory card from my camera and came across this picture:

Back in October, Eric and I went to Beaufort, NC for my college roommate’s wedding (where we ate dinner next to a shark tank! – the reception was at the aquarium…and for lack of a better description because I'm completely exhausted, it was really freakin' cool!). During our trip, we found one of the greatest additions to the culinary world: the “Pig in a Puppy” from Kings Barbecue in Kinston, NC. This is up there with the bacon and chocolate bar. It’s a pulled pork sandwich with a giant split hush puppy as the bread. For those of you who don’t know, Eastern NC barbecue is chopped pork with a spicy, vinegar-based sauce and a hush puppy is a fried corn cake. We actually stopped at Kings twice – on the way down and back from Beaufort.

This picture reflects Eric’s perfect meal: NC bbq, fried okra, and sweet tea. It's just a shame that we live so far away - this is a sandwich that I could eat on a weekly basis (I'm trying to show some restraint by not saying "daily"...although realistically, I probably could eat NC bbq daily - we ate it five days straight in October and both Eric and I would have happily eaten more had we more time). This is one of the tough things about living in NYC...we have tons of great new, fairly authentic, southern BBQ joints in the city, but none of them seem to get the NC pulled pork right.