Our weekends usually include one or two (who am I kidding? SEVERAL)  meals out. I bid adieu to all culinary constraints and indulge without – thinking about – the bulge.

So, from here on out begins the  Weekend Chow-Wow series – it’s a Pow-Wow for foodies. I’ll record our weekend’s gorging, binge eating, face stuffing, food sampling indulgences. Maybe through this cathartic process I will ‘guiltafy’ myself into eating right from Monday through Thursday. Perhaps, just perhaps, I’ve stumbled on a new dieting breakthrough.

On Saturday we wandered into Honey Toast Cafe in Beaverton.

We started off with a bunch of appetizers – fried salt and pepper chicken, fried green beans and fried baby octopuses. Yeah, you read that right – three fried appetizers. And, yeah, that little matter of baby octopuses. I’m that kind of mamma – always schooling her kids in healthy eating, expanding their knowledge (of sea creatures, in this case). As proof, we counted tentacles and discussed the suction cups on them. They also worked to drive home my favorite mama metaphor with the kids: Do I look like an octopus? Do you think I have eight arms? Just how many things can one person do at one time???

I told you it was a legit appetizer – I did not just want to stuff ma face.

After gorging on fried food that sucked up a good percentage of the country’s oil imports, we were filled to the gills. But leaving Honey Toast Cafe without sampling the honey toast is like walking out of Sea World without seeing Shamu. (It’s an underwater analogy kind of day).

Honey Toast is essentially  Toast Gone Wild – a chunky hunk o’ bread, slathered with butter, toasted, drizzled with honey and topped with ice-cream. Evidently, it’s a spin on Taiwanese street food. We didn’t brave the recommended Red Bean Honey Toast (the octopus had already tested my culinary chutzpah.)

We went, instead, with the all-American apple pie version: the toast was topped with a generous scoop of vanilla ice cream, baked apples, a drizzle of caramel sauce and a light dusting of cinnamon. The best part was the bread. It was crusty and crunchy and gooey where the ice-cream had soaked in and oh so wonderful. The kids wanted the s’mores honey toast – and who’s to argue in the face of  a possible marshmallow meltdown? When the battle is mamma vs. miniature marshmallows, guess who wins every single time?