5 Foods On the Naughty List You Need To Eat

Chicken and waffles from OMG Cafe in Richmond.

Maybe it's me, but I am plenty sick and tired of being blasted by yet another article featuring a how to eat healthy during the holiday season diatribe, especially those touting a personal listing of "foods to avoid". It's Christmas/Hanukkah/ Kwanzaa (a.k.a. Festivus) time for god's sake. You're supposed to eat too much, drink too much, and generally not give a crap about your waistline for the next couple of weeks only to pull a 180 on January 2 and hit the gym while starting your new found power smoothie breakfast kick. Once that ends approximately two weeks later, it's back to the french fries and ham biscuits (not necessarily together, but food for thought) so I see no reason to try to bunk the natural course of things as they are meant to be. Save the salad greens and steamed tofu for bathing suit season. That's a far more important time of the year since you can no longer hide your ass under a wool coat.

In the meantime, to help you stay on course, I've assembled a tasty list of some of my favorite high caloric goodies that should help you to pack on at least a fiver by the first of the year.

Pimento Cheese: Frankly, there aren't many foods that offer such a deliciously mayonnaisy combination as this ubiquitous dish. However you like to make it is totally up to you, but the fact is, you're eating spoonfuls of mayo and shredded cheese mixed together all creamy and gloppy. Up the ante of this dish and stuff some pimento cheese into a burger or slather a couple of slices of white bread in butter and make a pimento cheese grilled cheese. Here's my family's recipe, which is a good, basic version to get your started.

Meat: Ladies, nothing tells your man you love him more than a big, fat, marbly steak, and nothing makes me happier than sitting down to a big plateful of juicy meat with him. My personal go-to's are the NY Strip or the Ribeye which offer up plenty of meaty goodness, fatty charred ends and beaucoup forkfuls of tender bites. If it's too cold outside, pan sear your meat in a cast-iron pan and top it with a compound butter like a rosemary, shallot and salted butter mix. Pair it with a big pile of roasted garlic mashed potatoes to seal the deal.

The Big-Ass Breakfast: No evening of overeating is complete without consuming a giant pile of pork products, high cholesterol eggs, caffeine, and ideally a Bloody Mary or two the following morning. Hence, the big-ass breakfast. Whether you want to do it up Southern-style with biscuits, grits and country ham or U.K.-style (pictured above) with bacon rashers, sausages, blood-laden black pudding and perhaps a grilled mushroom or tomato for good measure, I'm a firm believer in eating big, especially in the morning.

Fried Food: I can think of no other way to completely derail any stretch of healthful eating than by sitting down to demolish a platter of fried seafood, buttery bread, fries and mayo-laden tartar sauce, except if you add in a pitcher of Miller High Life to wash it all down. There's something totally irresistible about battered food, any food really, from deep fried Twinkies to the glorious corn dog, so I declare this 2011 holiday season to be the year of the deep fat fryer.

Nitrates: So apparently nitrates, which are found in most forms of processed meats including hot dogs, pepperoni, salami, even that mystery meat in a can known as Spam, apparently aren't so good for you. Sure, there are some studies out there touting that digesting any meat goods with artificial red coloring can lead to cancer, and this may in fact be true, but let me offer you another nugget of non-scientific info, this dude has been sucking down massive quantities of hot dogs for years and he's still with us. Moreover, he has zero percent body fat, so perhaps these so-called "studies" need to be revisited. In the meantime, I suggest making a Chili Slaw Dog for lunch and stop worrying about it.

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Because You Need More Meat: Breakfast, UK-Style

Start the day off right--a traditional Welsh breakfast

One of my many food resolutions for 2011 is to eat more big, fatty breakfasts. I've gotten quite lazy in this regard, and have found myself nibbling a couple of crackers, a bowl of fruit, maybe a couple of scoops of yogurt, or most of the time, simply endless cups of black coffee. And, what have I gotten out of this? By the time lunch rolls around, I'm famished and half out of it, with most of my spaciness attributed to one hell of a sugar crash. The answer here is clear. I need to eat more greasy meat.

Low fat granola bars are no way to live, especially when something like this can instead be enjoyed with vim and vigor:

Over the years, I've traveled somewhat extensively throughout England, Scotland and Wales, and what I've discovered (in addition to some seriously good beer) is that the Brits know how enjoy a hearty breakfast. Being from West Virginia, where my granny was known to known to cook meals where literally everything had some sort of meat or meat byproduct in it, be it country ham gravy, fatback infused collards or brown beans simmered in nothing but a ham hock and a little salt and pepper, I have always counted myself as some sort of meaty expert when it comes to all meals, especially breakfast. Growing up in our house, the eggs were fried in bacon grease, the white gravy made from country sausage drippings, and the biscuits rolled in pure lard, so when I sampled my first real British-style breakfast, I seriously thought I had been transported back to granny's kitchen.

A traditional English breakfast must include Heinz beans

Eggs fried in bacon grease? Check. Greasy sausage links? Check. Bacon (streaky bacon) or Rashers (which are made from pork loin versus all belly)? Check. Side of canned baked beans in a tomato sauce that contains way too much sugar? Yup. All that was missing was a buttery biscuit and a bowl of mom's homemade apple butter, and I can forgive the Brits for including a vegetable or two (hence, the tomato and the mushroom) since those were also cooked in bacon drippings making them perfectly acceptable.

And, there are plenty of variations to the "Full Breakfast" theme, making an English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh breakfast a veritable blank canvas of potential porky goodness. There's black pudding (a.k.a. blood sausage) which is a combination of pig's blood, suet, breadcrumbs and oatmeal that is pan fried and served alongside your eggs, sausage, rashers and beans. (See photo a top.) Apparently, Barbara Streisand is a pretty big fan of it, too, which makes it even more cool (or she ruined it).

In Wales, it's all about the laverbread (a.k.a. Bara Lafwr). Laverbread is a nutrient-rich breakfast treat made from Laver, a type of seaweed found off the coast of Britain. Traditionally, it's pureed an served alongside rashers, sausages and cockles, making it the most healthy breakfast additions of the bunch. While visiting Wales, I found it to be particularly tasty when spread on a piece of crusty, buttered toast.

Photo courtesy Welsh Foodie

Other additions to a full U.K.-styled breakfast range from bubble and squeak (made from a mixture of leftover roasted vegetables often including cabbage, potatoes and carrots), sauteed mushrooms, oatcakes, farl (Irish fried soda bread) or the pinnacle of all that's good when it comes to pieces-parts, Scottish Haggis.  Last, but not least, all of this grease-laden goodness must be washed down with pot of hot black tea or perhaps a pint of Guinness if you're doing it Irish-style and/or straddle the alcoholic line.

Making a hearty meat-laden breakfast in honor of the British Isles couldn't be easier. Start with your meats (bacon, sausage, rashers, black pudding etc...) and fry them well in a hot pan (cast-iron is best for flavor).  Drain on paper towels and reserve most or all of the grease, depending on your intended fat quotient. Next up, fry any vegetables like a sliced-in-half tomato, mushrooms (Portabello is deliciously woody) or cubed potatoes. Set those aside. Keep your pan hot and crack in your eggs. Fry them how you like.  I like over-easy best for its runny-ness factor. Toast your bread. Warm your beans and season the whole shebang with plenty of freshly ground black pepper and a little salt.

We added a little Toad in Hole action to our breakfast

Some recipes are not meant to be an exact science and are better off with a little of this added to a little of that. Hence, why I don't have an actual written recipe for you. However, for you anal types (and you know who you are) here's a link to Jamie Oliver's Full Monty Breakfast Recipe which I think is pretty close to an authentic English-style start to the day. Chef Oliver recommends serving his breakfast with my favorite condiment on the planet, HP Sauce, so that automatically makes it a good rec in my book.

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