From Chicken Scallopini to Hot Pimento Cheese A Glutton’s Long Road Home
- Feb 2
- 3 min read
December 9, 2025
From Chicken Scallopini to Hot Pimento Cheese
A Glutton’s Long Road Home
(Final—truly final)
I ate breakfast standing at the counter this morning, the same way I do every morning now: two eggs folded over spicy pimento cheese, half an avocado mashed onto Ezekiel bread, Texas Pete running through it like red-clay rivers back home. Simple. Cheap. Enough.
Twenty-five years ago, that plate would have felt like penance.
In 1985 I moved into Bryant Hall—the concrete monastery where Alabama football players were forged through iron, noise, and appetite. The third floor was pure chaos: Ward Murphy, Steve Clonts, Lance Laskey, George Salem, John Fruhmorgen, Gary Otten, Butch Lewis, Scott Blankenship and Tommy Cole—big men, bigger hunger, three linemen to a room. Make weight and make grades and you earned steak. Miss either and you were sentenced to the Cream Team: everything but the ice cream. Public discipline by dessert. I spent most of two seasons there and still ate like tomorrow might never come.
That was the gospel then: eat big, play big, live big.
A lifetime later, I found myself in Birmingham buying a condo one block from Bottega, so I never had to choose between another bottle of Barolo and a safe ride home. Frank Stitt and Chris Hastings became my high priests. Chicken scallopini my sacrament. I once overcooked romance so badly I hired a horse-drawn carriage and had Frank send an entire dinner—course by course—up to the Highland Plaza rooftop. City lights, white tablecloth flapping, pure Disney-princess absurdity. Thirty minutes in, she vanished like smoke. I sat alone with enough food for twelve and learned something painful: even Frank Stitt can’t redeem desperation dressed up as grandeur.
I thought appetite was identity.
My god was my belly, and I kept him well fed.
Then came July 30, 2019.
They cracked my sternum, removed a calcified, stenotic aortic valve, and sewed in a St. Jude mechanical one—click-click, tick-tick. Every heartbeat now a tiny liturgy reminding me I am alive by mercy and metal. Somewhere in that operating room, the old man died. A new one woke up—owned, claimed, and sent. Quarter-million-dollar man, they say. I call it grace with a receipt.
When I got home, bacon tasted like death. A six-course tasting menu sounded like chains. Jesus said, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me and to finish His work” (John 4:34). For the first time in my life, I understood hunger.
Not appetite.
Hunger.
Lettermen of the USA became the race set before me (Philippians 3:14). No longer my idea to curate—only my calling to obey. I run it now with a heart that literally clicks when I hug the veterans we serve, a reminder that this life is sustained moment by moment, breath by borrowed breath.
Every February at the One Yard at a Time Gala, Frank and Pardis still donate a dinner for four at The Club in Birmingham. Veterans who once ate cold MREs in 130-degree Iraqi heat now sit at linen-draped tables while those legendary orange rolls arrive warm and glossy, smelling like somebody’s best childhood Christmas. Then come the short ribs—falling apart, sauce deep as mercy. I watch grizzled men in ill-fitting blazers close their eyes at the first bite and whisper, “Good Lord,” the same way I once did over foie gras—only their prayer carries forty years of sand and sacrifice.
Sometimes I scrape the last bit of pimento cheese from the jar and feel that metallic click in my chest. I think about that poor girl fleeing a rooftop full of food. Younger me would’ve been angry. Older me just smiles.
She wasn’t running from the dinner.
She was running from a man who still believed steak, ice cream, and orange rolls were the point.
They never were.
“I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.” (Galatians 2:20)
These days I eat like a man who knows he’s already been saved: two eggs, avocado, Ezekiel bread—and a mission that finally tastes like enough. Every heartbeat clicks a reminder: the quarter-million-dollar man is just a borrowed vessel with a very specific assignment.
One yard at a time.
One veteran at a time.
One orange roll at a time.
One click at a time.
Grace is louder than any valve.
And infinitely sweeter than ice cream ever was.
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