Gaudio: Eating with family is 'heaven'

Once again, I tripped over my own hypocrisy. Puerto Ricans and Dominicans make some really delicious food: Pernil. Gandules. Mofongo. Arroz y habichuelas.

And I tease my Dominican and Puerto Rican friends — especially the guys — because it seems they won’t eat anything at all (even American food) unless they have rice with it.

Years ago, a Puerto Rican doctor I trained with and I were eating spaghetti marinara, and he asked for a side of rice with it.

I said, “Dude, you can’t have rice with pasta!”

“Look,” he said, “if I don’t eat rice, it’s like I haven’t eaten.”

I thought it was riotously funny, and I couldn’t stop teasing him for all those carbs.

Today, I have a lot of Hispanic patients who are diabetic. The issue of carbohydrates in rice is a discussion we have all the time, and they say the same thing in Spanish as my friend: “Si no como arroz…” (“If I don’t eat rice…”). And so I tease and cajole and try to educate about carbohydrates.

Carbohydrates have deserved to get a bit of a bad rap, of course. Simple carbs get converted to free glucose, which increases insulin level. Insulin pulls the glucose efficiently out of the blood stream and into the cells. The insulin hangs around afterwards, alone in the blood stream, and insulin alone in the blood stream — with the free glucose already stored away — just makes you hungry again so you eat more.

It also makes you turn on cholesterol production and start to store fat And it wreaks havok on your arteries. Simple (bad) carbs are high in beer, potatoes, white flour, pasta, bread, white rice, and of course sugar and sugary drinks, and eating/ drinking these things puts fat right in the gut — the “beer belly.” It also raises triglycerides and leads to the prediabetic “Metabolic Syndrome X,” and increased risk of heart disease, stroke, heart failure. It’s also the main reason why I am usually late for dinner at night and in trouble at home.

We kill people we love through food. When he was alive, my Uncle Ralph was the most beloved uncle to all of us in my family. He was a diabetic who loved sweets and who could make anything or fix anything for anyone.

So come birthdays or Christmas, everyone always wanted to do something nice for Uncle Ralph. What do you give your Italian uncle whose biggest joy in life is to sit with his family and eat and whose favorite thing to eat is sweets? You give sfogliatelle, canoli, biscotti, and profiterole. You give chocolate with nuts and ice cream cake. You bake and bake. And you don’t think about the fact that he has diabetes because you just want to make him happy. He sits

there at the table that he made in the kitchen that he built in the house that he built, the king in his castle surrounded and content and eating.

I remember how he leaned over to me once, eating a slice of cake with everyone around, looking at the food and the family and he whispered,

“Jon, I don’t ever want to die because this, with everyone around and all this good food, is heaven.”

Still, I’d laugh and tease and cajole and tell him to cut out the carbs, but the truth is I really did love seeing him so happy.

Recently, my wife and I discovered THE best Italian restaurant, of all unexpected places, in Center Harbor, N.H., right on Lake Winnipesaukee, called Gusto.

With the lake as beautiful backdrop, I sat with a gorgeous plate of light, homemade tagliatelle with a superb Bolognese sauce and glass of chianti. It was so divine.

There was a basket of bread, and after I finished the pasta, I did what is called “fare la scarpetta,” which is to take that freshly baked ciabatta bread and use it to soak up all the glorious sauce to eat.

The owner Elena, who hit it off with my wife being that they are both from Italy, teased me over my scarpetta.

Just today, a friend texted me and pointed out what a troglodyte I am for doing “la scarpetta” — to say nothing of the fact that my Italian need for bread with everything is no different than others’ need to eat rice with everything. It’s just a different type of carbohydrate.

Oh, the hypocrisy.