pie

I’m back from the South, and I feel like a stuffed penguin.

A few pounds is worth it, though. (Half of me just cringed. It is?) Yes. It is. Sometimes you have to ignore pesky little “calories” and submit to the lure of bacon, cheese and mayonnaise. Just for a few days.

Sometimes you gotta just order a pimento cheese sandwich for lunch, bulging with grated cheddar and mayo.

And then go home and make a buttermilk pie for dinner.

Sometimes you have to buy honey-roasted pecans from a small-town Georgia gift shop, because, well, it’s a small-town Georgia gift shop. And they serve the nuts in paper cones!

But all that doesn’t even come close to my most gluttonous of gluttony acts, committed while we were in Atlanta. My friend is a restaurant critic there, and last Friday, he took us out for a fabulous meal at Cakes & Ale, a “farm-to-table” style restaurant (in the parlance of our times) where most of the food is made with locally grown produce.

While we stuffed our face with fried okra with homemade ranch, smoked salmon with beets, rabbit terrine, trout, bean salad with bacon, and the most heavenly pork chop ever, covered in crunchy breadcrumbs and fried in clarified butter (somewhere, I just heard my mom gasp) — we happened to bring up hamburgers. My friend mentioned that a restaurant nearby had one of the best burgers in Atlanta. Would we be interested in dining there, after this meal?

Only someone as loony about food as I am would suggest eating dinner at two restaurants in one night. But I loved my friend for it. With stars in my eyes, and a burger-inspired flush in my cheeks, we headed to Holeman & Finch Public House in Buckhead.

The H&F burgers are kind of a cult thing in the city right now — they’re not on the menu, and the kitchen just rolls ’em out at 10 p.m. You get them while they’re hot.

At about 10:30 p.m. — even though I’d already eaten a three-course dinner — I had the juiciest, moistest burger I’ve ever had in my life.

The next day, I nursed my food hangover with salad and water. But Sunday, there was more.

For brunch, we dined at Greenwoods on Green Street, a home-cooking restaurant in Roswell, Georgia, just north of Atlanta. Our plates filled the entire table. You could seriously barely see the wood.

We had fried green tomatoes….

And corn muffins… made with white corn, not that blasphemous yellow stuff.

We had fried chicken, with a sheen of oil still clinging to its crunchy, hot flesh.

I ordered a truly insane slab of meatloaf, topped with a few curls of onion.

And then came the pie.

Apple. Buttermilk. And dark chocolate, topped with messy tufts of whipped cream.

When we got to the airport a few hours later, I could barely keep my eyes open. “Just let us win!” the pie whispered to me. “Just go to sleep!” But I stubbornly stayed awake. The pie and its sugar-coma powers would not take me down.

So, now, finally back home in Mexico City, I am wearing my elastic-waistband pajama pants and wincing at the thought of putting on jeans to go to the grocery store. But I need detox food — veggies, fruit, tofu. Crayton rolls his eyes when I crow, “I’m going on a detox!” because I never stick to it, but this time I swear it’s true. It’s soups and salads for me, for the next few days. And I don’t want to see red meat again for two months.