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

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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