Wednesday, February 21, 2001
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Wednesday, February 21, 2001 |
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clean-living chicken makes real good eggs By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE Eggs. We miss eggs the most. Since our cholesterol reports still raise our doctor's angst, Dave and I limit ourselves to one, at most two, "real" eggs a week. Whenever possible, I use egg substitute, which may explain why I can't seem to bake a cake worth a flip any more. Not that I bake cakes any more. They require shortening. In our near-obsessive battle with fat, we spread jam on dry toast, scatter skim-milk mozzarella on whole-wheat pizza, and order our weekly Waffle House grits and waffles butter-free. When we eat chicken which we rarely do the skin comes off, and we no longer buy bottled milk at all. Reconstituting dry milk eliminates fat as well as those virtually unrecyclable bottles. And we've cultivated a real taste for fat-free vegetable burgers and low-fat soy "bacon." In an earlier incarnation I worked as a medical assistant. My tasks included drawing blood and centrifuging specimens for the lab courier to pick up at day's end, typically vials containing a bit less than 10 cc, or two teaspoonfuls, of blood. The centrifuge spins blood into red cells and pale yellow serum, and one day I noticed that occasionally a vial had what appeared to be a band of pure white material, like wax, between the two components. I asked the doctor if I had picked up the wrong kind of tube, one with a nylon stopper that I hadn't noticed before. "No," he said, looking amused. "That's fat. In a patient with high cholesterol, the fat spins out of the blood and forms a separate layer between the red cells and the serum." Fat. A band of fat perhaps as much as 5/8-inch wide in a container holding less than two teaspoonfuls of blood. In my mind's eye, I pictured all the blood in this patient's rather ample body, carrying that much fat just looking for places to form plaque on the arterial walls. And people wonder why I found it easy to adopt a vegetarian diet? So when Dave and I do eat eggs (five grams of fat and 213 mg of cholesterol) it is with a degree of ceremony reserved by most people for their faith's high holy days. First of all, with a dozen eggs lasting six weeks, I can afford to buy organic. They're brown, very large, and taste wonderful, and they come in a box that says, "A clean-living chicken makes real good eggs." In Germany last March, I bought a set of egg spoons, tiny, beautifully shaped stainless steel implements that fit perfectly into the curves of an eggshell. There were six in the set, exactly right for us to keep a pair at home, a pair in the motor home, a pair in the boat. Germans take their egg-eating seriously all right, Germans take everything seriously. They'll put fried eggs on just about anything, including pizza. I'm not making this up, as fellow-columnist Dave Barry would say. The first time I saw "ein Spiegelei" on a pizza menu, I grabbed my German dictionary in disbelief, and still wasn't sure I had it right until I saw one served to a fellow diner. No surprise, then, that a typical German breakfast includes a couple of soft-boiled eggs in addition to slabs of butter, cheese and ham, with crusty rolls and strong black coffee and cream. It's a fat-laden tradition we learned to love, back before our blood tests dictated caution. So, for Christmas, German daughter Mary sent her dad a device we love to show friends, asking "What do you suppose this is, and what is it used for?" A slim nine-inch shaft attached to a sharp-edged cone, it's made of brushed stainless steel in true German craftsmanship. A small ball at the other end of the shaft provides a grip, while a larger heavy steel ball slides on the shaft. What Mary didn't know was that by the time Christmas came, Dave had not eaten an egg in eight months ever since the day last May when he watched X-rays of his own heart struggling to pump blood past a near occlusion in two arteries. Angioplasty opened them nicely, and he swore that would never happen again. You can imagine, then, how shocked I was to hear him say on the morning before Christmas, "I believe I'd like to have a soft-boiled egg for breakfast." I knew what was in the tall, narrow package Mary sent, and didn't want him to have to wait another eight months before he used it. I handed it to him while the egg-timer ticked away seven minutes. "Here," I said. "You'd better open this today." Didn't take him long to figure out how to work his new egg Klacker. He placed the cone over the narrow end of the egg, and holding it firmly in the cup, slid the ball to the top of the shaft. When he let it go, it hit the cone with a satisfying "clack!," cutting a perfect circle around the shell. A deftly wielded knife removed the severed shell perfectly, and after a shake of salt and a twist of the pepper grinder, the little egg spoon went to work. No egg ever tasted better, Dave declared. Somewhere, a clean-living chicken would have been proud.
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