Tip to Tail: A Month of Pork: Day 3: Breakfast Creativity

I know there's going to be repetition in this excercise; but I want to try and avoid it as much as possible, both for my mental and physical health. Bacon sandwiches represent the love that makes the world go 'round, and sausages and eggs are the fuel for that love, but let's be serious, you cant eat like that every morning unless you're a trucker or a lumberjack, and sadly (with the exception of "Lumberjack January" where every man with an unkempt beard is a lumberjack), I am neither.

On the topic of "Lumberjack January", for those unfamiliar with the idea, it came about when a group of my friends decided to grow our beards in January for nothing more that to prove that we could. The side benefit is that a thick beard in January keeps your face warm and protects it from the biting cold of the wind. People would ask why we were growing our beards...what charity were we supporting. I balked at the thought. It seems that we've come to a point in our social consciousness where someone can't do something fun, silly or stupid unless it benefits a charitible cause. We were doing it for nothing more than camraderie...and by the end of it I'll be damned if we didn't look good. Bring on the "Kenora Dinner Jackets" (look it up) and axes! But please forgive me; I've digressed.

This morning I put together a slightly more sensible breakfast...one that didn't have "heart attack" written all over it. While strolling the aisles of my local grocery store the other day it occurred to me that plain oatmeal, or just plain oats would be a great base for a savoury oatmeal of bacon and sausage. I was extremely pleased with the tasty result. I couldn't finish the whole thing, but that was equally a result of the meal being filling as it was the result of me not being in the eating mood after a sad phone call. Half of it was tossed in the trash.

When old guys like my uncle Carmelo get bored...they make stuff like this

There are no rules to the month dictating that I must cook everything (Day 1's pork belly was purchased from a food court), so I gladly accepted my parents' invitation to lunch. Mom had heard about my "Month of Pork" in passing, but didn't know that I had begun full force. Sadly, I had to refuse the chicken parmigiana that tempted me from across the table. Thankfully, mom's creativity allowed me to knock a new item off of the "tip to tail" list. The main course was "cotiche" (pork skin) and fried eggs, a common meal amongst working class post war Italians. I wasn't there for the preparation, but it requires that you boil raw pork skins until tender and then scrape the skin of all visible fat. It may not be the healthiest meal, but it's no worse than the fried crap that most people eat on a daily basis. Oh...and it was delicious!

My mom's neglected chicken parmigiana

Fried eggs and cotiche (pig skin)

We also enjoyed some of my family's sopressate, a hot lean version that turned out very well. I guess there were no menstruating women in the room when it was being prepared; they've been known to ruin home-made salami. More on that in another entry.

Stack of sopressate goodness

Since I had negelected my morning workout, I put in an hour on the stationary bike while two rack of pork ribs slowly cooked on barbeque for dinner. One rack was slathered in a russian smoky hot sauce, the other in my mix of wasabi, horseradish and dijon mustard. They cooked slowly for close to three hours and were rendered into a tasty, tender mess of sauce and meat and bones. I'm willing to put them up against the best of the best as far as ribs go. Newsflash, if you judge ribs solely based on the "fall of the bone" quaility of the meat, your're likely an idiot who boils their meat and should probably stick to Swiss Chalet and the delicious lemon tea that they serve at the end of each meal. Food loser!

To go along with the ribs was some leftover tenderloin from last night, asparagus, fresh mozarella and a mandatory salad so that a cardiologist could give the meal a mark of approval.