Eating healthy can burn you

Eating healthy can kill you -- or at least leave you homeless.

While cooking a pot of pinto beans recently, I looked in the icebox for something with which to season them.

In there was ham and fatback, both of which do wonderful things to pinto beans but bad things to your blood pressure.

I turned the stove down reeeeeal low, set the timer for added security and traipsed off to the Piggly Wiggly for a healthy alternative: smoked turkey leg.

On the way there, a radio commercial for a new movie came on, so I pulled up to the theater I was passing. The theater with the freshest popcorn was 25 minutes away, though, so I drove there instead, bought a ticket and one of those giant tubs of popcorn -- you know, the ones so large you just crawl in and eat your way out.

I tried to ignore the insistent buzzing going off in my pants, but eventually I looked at the number on my cell phone and went outside to take the call. It was someone from my home security system company telling me that a smoke alarm was going off at the crib.

Why, that's impossible. I only left a pot of --

Uh-oh. I hurried home in rush-hour traffic, wondering in what state of conflagration I would find my home and which friend would let me crash on his sofa for a year.

The security company lady called back. "The Durham Fire Department is on-site," she said. "They have removed the beans from the stove."

"They have removed the beans from the stove."

Why, her voice sounded like what I imagine an angel's voice sounds like when she beckons you into heaven -- or at least what the lady at the courthouse sounds like when saying, "Congratulations. The DNA test came back negative."

I've always admired firefighters, but to really appreciate those dudes, you have to see one standing on your front porch holding a pot of incinerated pinto beans.

They couldn't save my beans, but they saved my bacon. I didn't even mind when they laughed after one observed, "Man. That's a lot of beans for one person."

There are two rules I've always lived by: Never trust a baldheaded barber, and never shoot pool for money with a man who has his own custom-made pool cue.

There's now one more I can add: Never trust that "timer" button on your stove that's supposed to turn the sucker off.

Durham Assistant Fire Marshal Edward Reid tried to spare my feelings, saying "I wouldn't call it 'carelessness.' During this time of year, people start doing things they normally don't do, especially when cooking. You just got sidetracked. ... Once my mother went out and left the stove on. Being the fireman I am, I instinctively turned it off. When she got back, she was angry because I didn't know she'd left a turkey cooking."

The firefighter who removed my pot of burned beans said that if I hadn't had a smoke alarm, "we'd be fighting a fully-involved fire right now."

Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill fire departments provide free smoke alarms. "We'll even assist you in putting it in," Reid said.

You're still wondering, aren't you, how eating healthy can kill you or leave you homeless?

Like this: If I'd just tossed the fatback or ham in the beans, I wouldn't have gone to the store, wouldn't have heard the commercial for that darned movie and wouldn't have had to rush back to a smoke-filled home.

Fatback isn't good for one's blood pressure, but neither, I'm guessing, is inhaling smoke for the next six months.