I Need a Good Recipe, Please

I’m on a diet. These four words are like a self imposed death sentence. To make it worse, I’m not on a diet to lose weight; I’m trying to lower my cholesterol.

High cholesterol doesn’t run in my family, it seems to be a stampede, so I went to my doctor for a standard cholesterol test. When I got the results, the nurse had thoughtfully stapled a list of local funeral homes to the back. Either I had to make a real change or one more clean white shirt would be about all I would need.

The original plan was to start a regimen of several drugs designed to lower my cholesterol count down to the “Holy Crap!” range and have me work on moderating my diet. I was in favor of this plan until I read the list of common side effects for these drugs. Headaches, the creeping crud, hearing loss, galloping galontis, housemaid’s knees, impotence, loss of bladder control, sudden onset serial killer syndrome, and an uncontrollable desire to read the National Enquirer. This is better than high cholesterol? After a couple of years of this, I can just imagine myself squatting painfully in a puddle of urine begging for a heart attack.

I’m not very good with that moderation crap, either. Personally, I believe that moderation is for monks. If you want me to quit something, okay, I think I can do that, but moderation is beyond my reach. So, I guess I have to quit eating things with cholesterol. This can’t be that bad as I checked and there is no cholesterol in scotch. As long as the good people at Laphroaig don’t start distilling their scotch from cows, I thought everything should turn out okay.

Well, at least that was the plan. It turns out that eliminating cholesterol means eating practically no meat. I don’t know about you, but I would rather eat a vegetarian than be one. Nevertheless, I have somehow managed to eliminate almost all meat from my diet. I can say this, because in my opinion, chicken and fish are honorary vegetables, probably a member of the squash family.

This blog generates an extraordinary amount of hate/weirdo/religious email. Most of it begins with something along the lines of “You will never see the sweet face of Jesus…” So let me save some of you the trouble of writing. There is no way in the world to cook eggplant so that it tastes like meat, not even very bad meat. Evidently, the main ingredient in meat that tastes good is cholesterol. Why doesn’t someone invent artificial cholesterol?

Basically, I now eat exclusively what I call the Goat Puke Diet. This is because most of what I eat looks like a goat just puked it up. (Ever had barbecued goat? In Mexico, they call this cabrito. It’s fantastic.) And I have been on this diet long enough that I have to admit, it works. My cholesterol is down, the doctor no longer wants me on pills, and the people at the local cemetery are not warming up a hole for me.

There are more than a few problems with this diet. First, it’s boring. I’ve cooked vegetables every damn way you can think of. I am more than familiar with tempeh, and have a graduate degree in tofu. For a Texan, tofu would be a lot more fun if you could butcher your own after you shot a tofudebeast. While I have gotten to the point where I no longer really want a hamburger, I could kill nuns with a power sander for a filet mignon. I have dreams about t-bones.

Secondly, and much worse, my constant desire for a steak has started affecting my teaching. Several times in the last year I have found myself lecturing about cannibalism. No particular reason, I just wanted to. It is a little hard to find a connection between the War of 1812 and what the Polynesians used to call “Long Pork,” but I managed to make the leap just last week.

And several times recently, I have found myself checking out a few of the students for marbling. I saw a young lady just yesterday walking back to her dorm room from the pool, and the first thought that popped into my mind was whether or not her entire thigh would fit on my barbecue grill.

I’ve read the popular literature about cannibalism: the Donner Party and the book about the soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes. None of this made much of an impression on me. About all I remember of the latter is thinking they should have eaten the stupid pilot first, even if they weren’t out of regular food. But the idea of cannibalism must have been with me even before I started this diet.

Remember Y2K? The world was coming to an end and we all needed to stock up for the great famine. I had a plan. Call it Milliorn’s Law. It was a very simple plan: I would never starve as long as I have one fat neighbor. I had him picked out, he was old and I knew I could take him. While other people bought canned goods, I stocked up on meat tenderizer.

Unfortunately, that neighbor moved. But I’ve noticed a plump widow now lives on the corner.