Life In Scarborough: The Fried Pork Rinds of Scarborough
Was inside the Jian Hing market at Markham and Lawrence on Family Day, looking for Filipino Pork Rinds. They have about 40 different varieties at Jian Hing. I'm not kidding, there's a whole aisle devoted to nothing but. Filipino Pork Rinds are basically deep-fried pig-skin; you can get them either "fat on" or "fat off", which means there's chunks of deep-fried pork-fat still stuck to them, or not. I usually buy the "fat off" kind. I prefer the "fat on" version, but if I eat too much my sodium level spikes and the water in my inner ear backs up and I get the bed-spins for a week. So I'm in the cash-line behind this old Filipino guy. He looks at my 2 big bags of Chicharron Old Fashioned Fat Off Flavor and asks. "You like those?" I say: "Yes. They're good, not good for you. I know that." And he laughs and tells me how they eat them back home. Apparently, they dip them in vinegar, which seems red...