It's August! We're past the halfway point, which can mean one of two things:

1. The New Year's resolution to lose 10 pounds has been accomplished (hats off to you!) and you deserve to celebrate!!
   
   Or
    
2. You forgot about that resolution and/or have decided to push it back to 2012. (You've been busy. It happens to the best of us!).

Good news is that in either case, you're entitled to check out the Eat the Street Food Truck Rally!

This was the scene at around 4:30pm, in just thirty minutes, the place would be buzzing with hungry people looking for garlic-ey goodness.

For those of you that have no idea what I'm talking about, every month, Street Grindz partners up with Kamehameha Schools and throws an amazing (food) block party. On the last Friday of every month, the empty lot on the corner of South and Halekauwila Street is invaded by thousands of people and over 30 food trucks and street vendors. For food lovers, this is THE place to be.

July's theme was garlic, and I had been so incredibly excited, I almost jumped up and cheered when I found out I could get out of work early. The event started at 4pm and I meandered in with a coworker at just around 430p. We did a quick walk through to size up our options.

Hellooooo garlic aioli sauce. That seemed pretty common, along with garlic french fries, steak, pork, and chicken. The off the wall variations were found frozen with chocolate gelato, mixed into cheesecake truffles, and as a topping (garlic powder) for your shaved ice!

My coworker was a bit indecisive, so I just made an executive decision: "I'm getting deep fried cupcakes."

Turns out starting with dessert and picking something that didn't include garlic wasn't my best idea. These didn't really hit the mark for me. Not bad, but I guess I was expecting a crunchier coating. What I liked about it was that they weren't overly sweet, even with the cream cheese filling:

While we were in line, I also stole a picture of my friend's combo plate:

Deep fried spam musubi, fried chicken and a fried twinkie. *Drool* I've heard some amazing things about their chicken, but being a vegetarian totally keps me out of that loop. They had a special menu for the truck rally, and weren't offering any of their other fried musubi, so I didn't get to try that one. Definitely putting this on the list to find during the week!

Second stop was Inferno's Wood Fire Pizza truck. I was lucky in that less than a minute after I ordered my pizza, it came piping hot out of the oven. It's a bad picture, but if you squint a little, you'll see that at the back of their easy-up, there's an actual wood fire oven. Amazing!

Loved every garlicy-tomatoey-spinachey bite of this. Even though I think I burned the roof of my mouth on this one, because I didn't want to wait till it cooled off. While I was in line for pizza, my friend dashed over to Koi Catering and Takeout truck and scored their signature garlic ahi.

Last stop: Ono Pops! I wasn't feeling adventurous enough to get the garlic edamame pop, but I did venture out of my normal safe zone (plantation iced tea, strawberry lemonade and strawberry goat cheese) and tried a pickled green mango! I LOVE green mango. My entire family will attest to the fact that I could probably put away an entire pickle jar of the stuff. The thing is, I'm weird in that I don't like the sweet pickled mango. I actually just cut up green mango and dip it in a mix of shoyu, vinegar, and black pepper.

My mouth is seriously watering as I type.

So back to the Ono Pop! I didn't really like it. It was sour (which I liked) but it was also sweet and there were threads of actual mango in there. Those thread things are the worse part of green mango! I guess I'll have to stick to strawberry lemonade, which my friend ended up getting. That one is definitely one of my favorites!

If you're feeling adventurous, they have a long list of their "normal" flavors, as well as a chalkboard of the specials:

One thing I really love about the event is that they try their best to be green. They work with Tr3ees.com to separate trash into compostable, food waste for the farms, recycle-ables, and landfill waste.

Next month's theme is "Can you take the heat?" with spicy food being the focus. My advice, get there early. There's always tents set up with chairs and it gives you the opportunity to beat out the downtown pau hana crowd.

If large events aren't your thing, you can also find most of these trucks and vendors during their weekly rendevous. I've heard whisperings that Street Grindz is working with a local community makerspace, HI Capacity, to create an app for all the local food trucks! I believe it'll be up and running in the next month, so keep your eyes and ears open for that one!