food food food food

So yesterday Braeden, Jacob Seifert, and I went to this restaurant called Patti's in Solon, IA for their burger challenge: eat one 2.5 lb burger with all the fixings PLUS 1 lb of fries in under an hour and your meal is free. I mostly went along for the ride (although I did order the burger, too).

The Menu. Can you see it? The Monster of McBride. Yum.

And this is it in real life. Check out that gigantic meat patty! It's huge!!!

There we are! Notice that only Jacob is smiling...

(He didn't actually eat it this way: we all used a fork and knife. This picture was purely for comic effect. And so you can see how big it really is.)

Braeden digging in.

I'm still so afraid.

This was the 20 minute mark. Not bad!

I had pretty much given up at this point. Mouthful after mouthful of pure seasoned ground beef was really too much for me. (Especially since I couldn't stop thinking about that Titus Andronicus meat pie. Bleh! [see link below for a video clip of said nasty pie...if you dare])

This was near the end. Jacob had been a champ up to this point but now he was really starting to feel it...

This is where Braeden ended. Note that all the fries are gone and more than half the burger. Amazing.

This was mine. That is Jacob's thumbs down judging me in the background. If only he knew about the meat pie!!!

What can I say? It's a lot of food!

Jacob realizes that he doesn't have enough time or enough stomach to finish. But he fought a valiant fight.

Look at that! So close. And yet, so far...

 Braeden and Jacob both got further than any one else who's attempted it so far (before them the closest challenger had only finished about 30% of the burger and half the fries), but neither was able to finish. Jacob got the closest with about 4 bites of buger left and a dozen fries or so, but felt like he would vomit right then and there if he put another bite of food in his mouth. I don't blame him! I thought I did a pretty fair job myself but to look at it it looks like I barely touched the thing. It didn't help that the burger reminded me of the aforementioned scene from a movie interpretation of Titus Andronicus I watched in my Shakespeare class a few years ago. There's this part where they feed the evil queen a meat pie made of her sons and the thickness of the burger reminded me an awful lot of the scene where they scoop out the partially cooked meat pie and slop it on her plate. Bleh. I made sure to keep that comparison to myself until late last night. When I told Braeden he said it was a good thing I had otherwise he probably would have thrown up all over the table. Good times.

On a healthier note, Braeden invented a Winter Stir-fry for dinner tonight. One of my favorite meals he makes is what we've dubbed Autumn Stir-fry, a mix of veggies, chicken and apples topped with cheese. We had planned to make some for dinner tonight but when we went shopping on Tuesday the price of apples had jumped from about .87 a lb the week before to like 1.23 a lb. What? So we decided that we should come up with a new seasonal stir-fry, and thus Winter Stir-fry was born. It has mushrooms, carrots, Italian sausage, onions, and green pepper, all scooped over spaghetti squash and topped with mozzarella cheese. It. Was. De-licious. I think I have a new favorite stir-fry.

This I did finish. Then I  had seconds.