My husband announced to me yesterday amidst the usual hectic rush to get everyone ready and out the door in the morning that the Carolina Panthers ate Bojangles every Friday (I can not in all honesty corroborate this, so if it’s not true, blame my husband).  That’s nice, honey, and then I continued screaming at my oldest to get his shoes on, right now!  It was only later that I recollected his comment and I chuckled a little.  I grew up in South Florida and had never experienced a Bojangles before.  It had been several years of living in North Carolina before I had the pleasure and it was my husband and his family that first introduced it to me.

If you are not from the South, Bojangles is a great mystery.  Don’t worry you are not missing much.  I overdosed on it while first dating my husband and during our earliest years of marriage.  I had unknowingly walked into a family tradition.  Sunday.  Church.  Lunch at Bojangles.

During those early years, I had tried being a vegetarian and then a vegan.  Now I am neither.  I was a total failure.  Not because I just love meat so much, but because it is difficult to find anything in the South without some kind of animal in it.  Even the green beans at Bojangles have chunks of bacon/ham in it.  At one point I would eat the biscuit and egg sandwich for lunch, but when I became a vegan even that was out of the question.

When I wasn’t a vegetarian/vegan, I would eat the chicken strips, fried with some bizarre spicy coating beneath the crispy parts.

People in the South LOVE Bojangles.  The best thing on the menu is the sweet tea which is akin to the taste of the perfect summer day in heaven and is the sole reason for the diabetes and obesity epidemic in this area.  Maybe not the sole reason, but it is a delicious contributor.  Sweet tea is the reason I can’t get into my skinny jeans.  Damn you sweet tea.

Bojangles has an assortment of sides that are classically southern and not found at your run of the mill fast food joints like grits, pinto beans, dirty rice and macaroni and cheese. There are no hamburgers, but there is plenty of chicken.  And biscuits, lots of biscuits.  The other major source of diabetes and obesity.

I haven’t eaten Bojangles in years.  Even my husband’s family tired of the same old same old and have since changed their Sunday lunch choices.  The Panthers eat Bojangles (allegedly).  I even heard that a convoy of Bojangles sweet tea is on its way to San Francisco for the Super Bowl fans to partake.  Of course, we are rooting for the North Carolina Panthers in the Super Bowl tomorrow and whether they win or lose, I might just attribute it to their pregame intake of Bojangles.