Sonny's Tip of the Day

By -
It is a great day for Nicholasville, KY (aka. "Our Town"). They are getting their first Sonny's Real Pit Bar-B-Q. It's a great place to get ribs and other tasty goodness. One such item as their patented bucket of sweet tea. Now Sonny's is from Florida, and that's way farther south then Kentucky and they're a bit better at making their sweet tea then Applebee's. So you gotta be prepared for some sugary goodness. The problem comes when you haven't eaten since the night before and you're really thirsty. You have to resist the urge to drink 64 ounces on an empty stomach. If you don't heed this advice you could find yourself making a weird "Hacuspufffl" sound. Which can only be described as a hick-up/burp/sneeze/I-threw-up-a-little-bit-in-my-mouth combination. So resist the urge, just take a little sip of their delicious sweet tea and then wait for your ribs, your stomach will thank you for it.

Comments

JCo said…
The description of "hacuspuffl" is totally disgusting so drink slowly this afternoon my friends...have fun!
12 July, 2005 09:01
vander said…
You know what makes a glass of sweet tea even better? Listening to a great free mp3 by the best band of all time. Oh, hey look! Weezer is the free mp3 of the week! I hadn't noticed. Fancy that. Enjoy it, my little hacuspuffs.
12 July, 2005 09:17
Jay said…
Believe me, Jen, it was a scary thing. I was there. The best part was, Peter DASHED away from our table. Then Matt started to feel sick and ran away from the table. Biggins FREAKED out and we all SWORE the tea was poisoned. Fortunately, it was not, but Pete's right -- tea on an empty stomach = not good.
12 July, 2005 09:17
JCo said…
So Jay, were you raised on SWEET tea? I don't think I have ever had tea sweet enough to experience the above stated hacuspuff. Maybe I have been hanging up north for too long. Any other northerns want to chip in on this one?
12 July, 2005 09:59
vander said…
It's true; yankees don't get the sweet tea experience. Once you pass the Mason Dixon line, people at restaurants just look at you like you're stupid if you ask for sweet tea. It is, however, completely acceptable to drink hot tea and pour so much milk and sugar in it that it looks like chocolate milk. Go figure.

If I remember correctly, raspberry tea is actually a holdover from the Civil War era. Don't quote me on it, but I think at some point the north cut off trade with the south and so confederate women, having no tea leaves and being pretty mad about it, made do with raspberry leaves. So sweet tea could conceivably have a similar history. Just a guess.
12 July, 2005 10:42
Pete said…
"Once you pass the Mason Dixon line, people at restaurants just look at you like you're stupid if you ask for sweet tea."…and then say "we have sugar on the table you can put in it". What? what? Sugar in iced tea is totally different from sweet tea. That's the one piece of science that I appreciate. Sugar dissolves differently (read: much better) in warm liquids than cool ones.
12 July, 2005 11:20
Pete said…
UPDATE: Yum, Sonny's was good. All that I could have ever hoped or dreamed for. And I followed my own tip and all hacuspuffls were avoided!
12 July, 2005 13:34
Jules said…
Hey Jen - I'm also here to ring in on the opinion from the great white north (wait, I think that's Canada). Anywho... my mom drank unsweetened iced tea (blah!) for my entire upbringing like it was her job. Seriously, I think she might have been receiving checks from Lipton. As my Mom kept her IV flowing, I always opted for Kool-Aid, or any other beverage that would leave me with a colored 'stache. For that reason (as well as everyone else's penchant for the "brown water" variety that I ever encountered), until I came to KY, I had no idea how sweet and wonderful it could be. I even refused it for a great while, always saying, "Blah, I hate iced tea." After a lot of convincing, I was finally converted with just one taste. The sweeter the better and none of that Equal or Sweet n Low crap.

Another surprise when I came farther south? The first time my college friend from Atlanta used the term "yankees" I almost fell out of my chair. Unless we were studying the Civil War in History class, I had only ever heard that term used when discussing baseball players from NY. Go figure.

Finally... as one who sat next to Peter at lunch today, I'm glad he took his own advice.
12 July, 2005 15:53
vander said…
Yankee moms, I can vouch, do chug the unsweetened tea variety like they're being paid royalties. Our entire family is maladjusted to the south despite our locale. We don't always sweeten tea, we don't automatically put white gloppy gravy on things, and our homemade biscuits are like rocks. Don't get me started on the gross factor of pouring gravy on biscuits. Yechh. Sweet tea, however, is a southern staple that ought to meander north a little and make the world a better place.
12 July, 2005 17:06
Kris said…
I have to say, until we moved to Texas, I had never heard of sweet tea. And Pete, you are absolutely right, solids are more soluble in a hot liquid...although I have to say, although you can get more sugar into hot tea than cold, all they do to make sweet tea is dump a heck of a lot of sugar into regular tea. At least, that's how we made it when I waited tables. So, unless we are talking supersaturation here (I sure hope not...or we could all make rock candy from sweet tea), it really is the same thing to just sweeten it from the table.
12 July, 2005 23:23
Pete said…
At restaurants they do pore syrupy stuff in tea to make it sweet, but just trying to put sugar packets in unsweetened tea does not taste the same. Mainly because the sugar never fully dissolves.
13 July, 2005 09:54
Jules said…
You're right Peter - it just doesn't taste the same. In desperate times I've tried my best to do it (which involves me spending half the meal constantly trying to stir in the sugar... ice cubes flying everywhere...), but it's never how it should be.
13 July, 2005 10:32
Jay said…
Jules, you made me LOL. We've all been there--ice cubes EVERYWHERE. And with every sip you just think, "this is HORRIBLE, I wonder if the waitress can bring me several cups of sugar from the back so I don't have to waste all their stupid sugar packets."
13 July, 2005 16:49
Kris said…
Hmmm, I don't know about the sugar packet thing, because to be honest, I'm not a tea drinker. And I don't know about any syrupy stuff...when I was a waitress we just used big bags of regular sugar.
14 July, 2005 00:35
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