As I was driving home from seeing my older brother, my mom called to ask what I wanted for dinner. The two options were homemade pizza, or Sonny’s Bar-B-Q. For those of you whose homestates won the Civil War, Sonny’s is a chain of barbecue restaurants based out of Gainesville, Fla. (home of the University of Florida, where I was born). The Fort Myers location is just shy of five minutes from my house, and it’s possibly my favorite restaurant in the world.

Basically, they do real pit-smoked barbecue, mainly focused on Pork and Ribs. I’ve been told they have a salad bar, but I’ve never thought to notice it. They also have the best Sweet Tea I’ve ever tasted (although watching them pour a whole bag of sugar into the batch can almost give you ocular diabetes). The big reason we all loved sonny’s back in high school was that they do all-you-can-eat meals all day every day for pulled pork, sliced pork, sliced beef, and sliced turkey. Through a series of retrospectively obvious conclusions, we decided to hold a eating contest, apropriately dubbed “The Match of the Millenium.” I won’t get into the rules, but I consider myself a good eater, and I was out after three plates of pulled pork. The winner finished eight.

But I digress. The options presented to me as I bombed down Alligator Alley were homemade pizza or Sonny’s. I said yes:

That, dear readers, is a BBQ pulled pork Pizza, made with a mix of delicious barbecue, blatant disregard for public health, and love. I’ve got some pictures of the process after the jump (not safe for vegans):

I’m just going to present these in a slightly creepy food-porn striptease. Here is the pizza before being cooked:

We put the toppings under the cheese so that it wouldn’t get too dried out. There’s nothing worse than overcooked pork. But the really distressing, potentially dangerous part of this is what’s going on under all that cheese:

So what are you looking at there? Well, it’s a pizza crust on the bottom (obviously) with Sonny’s famous sweet sauce instead of tomato sauce. On top of that is roughly 3/4 pound of pulled pork, which was previously saturated with the same sauce. Then, becuase I have no regard for decency, there’s about a pint or so of baked beans spread over the whole thing. Before cooking, it was about an inch and an a half thick, and very little of that was crust.

I ate two pieces for dinner and felt like I was going to die. Fortunately for you, there are no after pictures of my gut.

So all in all, a good vacation.