Worth Dieing For!

I have a good friend who's been bugging me to get my cholesterol tested - and for some reason it's not my regular dining partner doing the nagging. . . should I be concerned?! As a person with a bit of "heart disease history" in his family he needed to know where he stood. The test came back amazingly positive (translation: all was good). Since then his finger scoops of sour cream - or worse, butter, have been worry-free. In fact he tells me that a cholesterol test can be hugely liberating when it comes to what you can and cannot eat.

Now me, I also come from a huge history of heart disease. But my psyche is a little different. While I've stashed away a bunch of money, it's probably not enough to afford that perfect water-front property in Haliburton and a weekly delivery of truffles, chanterelles and smoked salmon. So my exit strategy, flawed as it may sound, is to enjoy life to the fullest, looking fairly good in a tapered linen Boss jacket with a mandarin collar, while expecting to have a pretty decent life-threatening coronary at the point at which I stop pining for a Vespa.

And to that end, the other day I picked up something that was about as threatening to my health as carrying the Olympic torch in an international relay through Tibet. . . a 4 inch by 6 inch piece of pig skin!

"This is gonna shorten my life, right?" I asked Kyle, at Aubrey's.

"Of course", he responded... "but it's all the diaper years".

So I paid $0.96 for a slab of pure, heavenly fat!

When I was growing up we would have roast pork one Sunday out of every four - the others being reserved for Roast Beef and Yorkshire Pudding. But on the "roast pork" Sunday there would be a battle over who would get the "crackle". That's a pretty good word, "crackle"!

Fast forward thirty years, and in my adolescent mind I pictured a 4 inch by 6 inch piece of pig skin, roasted for an hour to crackling goodness, without parents around to play referree and portion bite sized pieces out to each sibling, as being roughly akin to a kid who'd spent 3 years at a boy's private school living in residence for the first year of university. . . I was going to overindulge!!

Jeffrey Steingarten says that the bacon course is the most important course of any meal... the "all important bacon course"! And a 4 inch by 6 inch piece of pig skin, salted and roasted is pure goodness.

Now, admittedly my roasted pig skin experience (ok - to set the record straight, I ate two 1 inch by 3 inch pieces over the course of 8 hours. . . yes, one of them accompanied a morning cup of coffee. . . what of it??!!), followed on the heels of a wonderful steak tartare the night before. So maybe that's not very health conscious. But I have a lot of 20 and 30 something female friends, and I'm figuring the last thing they'll be wanting to do in twenty years is cooming to visit some old guy who can't afford to get a refill on his viagra prescription and needs a diaper change.

So it's not always about me!!