I have to share.

A few months ago (it could have been longer … I’ve noticed that as I get older, time goes much faster,  and all of sudden huge chunks have slipped by without my notice) my mother and aunt surprised me with one of my favorite foods of all time.

The English Pork Pie.

They found an English shop and ordered all sorts of food goodies that I normally only enjoy while on the island of Britain itself.  Highly indulgent. Hugely decadent.  Indescribably delicious on every level.

My mother ~the saucy and industrious lady that she is ~ did a large order of pork pies, English bangers, black pudding (and I’m sure other things she has not shared because she loves a good surprise) and gave the man and I half a dozen.

We had our last two for breakfast this morning.  It tasted like England.

Each pie comes wrapped in paper, folded perfectly, and then labeled (in case you didn’t know which.would.be.insane, because you’re eating a pork pie in the United States of America and that in and of itself is not an every day event).  I have to take a moment and just ramble a little bit about the food I love when I visit the UK.  I have visited intermittently my entire life ~ I have picnicked in the Highlands of Scotland, and driven across the whole country with my mother at the wheel and my brother in the backseat learning every word to Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” I love England, feel an affinity for it that is part of my very soul; un-articulatable, deeply inherent.  I love pork pies, I love English sausages, I love 99s (an ice cream treat that is simply a Cadbury’s Flake stuck into vanilla soft serve ice cream), I love Scotch eggs … I love it all.

I’m an American, please don’t mistake me ~ but that doesn’t change the roots of my mother and my father.  Both have deep ties to where they are from, and how that formed who they became as people.  My mother emigrated to the USA in the early ’70s, so she’s as British as as it gets over here, accent and all.  My father grew up in a very Italian community in the greater Pittsburgh area, and just as I am British, I am Italian.  It deeply and inherently influenced how I grew up, and who I became.  I wouldn’t trade my roots and my originals for anything.  And that’s saying something, because as we all learn at some point in our lives, family isn’t a fairy tale.

If you are not acquainted, pork pies are a luscious little concoction of hot water pastry wrapped around pork.  My favorite part?  Hard to say really, but probably the translucent pork jelly on the interior.  Flavor-packed and delicious (once you get over the idea of clear-colored pork jelly, the equivalent of which I have never seen in the USA),  it makes the whole pie.

Ah! Yummers!

Just writing about it makes me sad that they are no more.  But with our new green juicing, and the prospect of our Seven Day Cleanse (beginning tomorrow) that essentially restricts all wheat products and many meats (including pork) I know that we did the pies justice by indulgently enjoying them on a Sunday while watching LoTR.  (Yes, that’s right folks ~ this weekend was an LoTR viewing extravaganza!).

Beginning tomorrow, I’m hoping to document the man and my journey as we begin green juicing in true earnest, do a seven day (to start) elimination diet, and really focus on the meaning of healthy eating, what it means to me, and how it’s possible to transition from what is often referred to (in many of the books I’ve been reading of late) as the “Mainstream American Diet” to something … better?  One of the things we both learned this past week, as we flirted with eating a mainly raw diet, was that changing the food we ate and the manner in which we ate it did drastically and immediately affect our bodies and our health. That knowledge made it much easier to commit to what we’re embarking on tomorrow.

Unfortunately, little (and delicious) pork pies don’t really fit in.  But I wanted to share them anyway, because I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed every.single.solitary.bite.