Heart Healthy

If my favorite breakfast is six large oysters broiled on toast x 2, second (leftover fried mullet is probably third) and not far behind the oysters, is liver pate' on toasted strips of whole wheat bread. 

This started seventy years ago when my mother would buy me liverwurst for sandwiches, made early on with butter, in later years with Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Slices of liverwurst, tubes of liverwurst labeled “Braunschweiger,” or fried chicken livers smushed with mayo or butter. Not heart healthy, and Linda, who never liked it in the first place, put the kabosh on all of it years ago, then rather uglily with my onset of heart disease symptoms, etc. late 2010. 

It’s still a first love, rarely indulged unless Linda was at Blue Lake or somesuchplace. Charlie Lahan’s Carousel at PCB had a tasty pate' that I used to buy when serving at St. Thomas Church, Laguna Beach 2004-2009, then later when shopping for wine: it must not have been a big seller, because the last time we were there that refrigerator shelf was other-occupied.  

A couple of weeks ago, however, we were in Tallahassee for three days and made our trek to Trader Joe’s, where I got these boxes of Block Red brand Australian shiraz. To my simple palate, shiraz needs at least a bit of aging, but at $10 the box = $2.50 per bottle equivalent, it’s okay, I might not especially recommend it to a friend who loved shiraz/syrah, but I would buy it again for myself. Maybe the producer could spray a whiff of "liquid smoke" into the plastic bags before sealing them up or something. 

There’s the horse wandering off the trail again, the subject was liver pate' wasn't it. When in a new grocery store I generally look in the peculiar foods section (wth, if they want to call it “gourmet” and run up the price, I look anyway), and there I found two or three different liver pate' products. The one I bought was Trader Joe’s brand, contains no pork, I think it was chicken liver, with sherry, I could just barely taste the sherry, which was perfect. We (I) bought it Sunday evening and had it on toast for breakfast both Monday morning and Tuesday morning. There’s the question now of whether the price of gas for a special trip to Tallahassee to get more should be calculated into my cost of another package of pate' or whether I could write off travel expense as purely the cost of seeing my girls. 

Now, God help me, a friend is vacationing in France and his travelogues, when telling what they had for lunch or supper, usually mention foie gras. This has unfortunately ignited my salivary glands into researching the internet for foie gras sources here in the USA. It’s barely a stretch to say there aren’t any. 

My cardiologist would likely be just as happy. But then, as I say, this taste is rarely indulged. Pate' is probably better held for the noon meal anyway, because it’s best with a glass of red wine, and I don’t do that with breakfast.

W+ still alive in +Time