Read Death of a Bacon Heiress for Free Online Page A

in the Big Apple, I think I’m finally coming back to earth and reality.
    My e-mail in-box has been flooded with requests for the recipe that I prepared on the show, so today I would love to share it with you.
    I’ve been kid free lately, so I invited my brother, Randy, and his husband, Sergio, over for dinner the night after I returned home from New York to try one of my favorite new cocktails, a Mexican Martini, before serving my now famous (at least in local circles) spicy Bacon-Wrapped Jalapeño-Stuffed Chicken Thighs.
    Dinner was delicious, and the cocktails were flowing when my brother remarked that it was amazing how much I love bacon (I eat it almost every day, cholesterol be damned!), especially after the incident early on in my marriage to my ex-husband, Danny.
    The story Randy was referring to happened just after Danny and I tied the knot and rented a tiny one-bedroom house on Crooked Road with an equally tiny backyard.
    Like most newlyweds, we were on a very tight budget and always trying to save money anywhere we could, so for our eggs and bacon we would run up the road to the Jones Family Farm on Saturday mornings and load up on fresh eggs and bacon at a low price that fed us for a whole week!
    One Saturday, Danny left to pick up our eggs and bacon and was gone for almost an hour. I started to worry, and was about to call Mr. Jones to see if he was still there, when Danny pulled up in his truck. I heard him burst through the back door to the kitchen and went to meet him to make sure he stored the eggs and bacon in the refrigerator. (He sometimes was easily distracted, once leaving an unopened carton of ice cream on the counter to melt into mush.)
    As I met him in the kitchen, the first words out of my mouth were, “What in the world have you done, and where’s my bacon?”
    Danny just stood there in the middle of our tiny kitchen, a big dumb smile on his face and a tiny bundle in his arms wrapped in a dish towel. He unwrapped the towel to reveal a baby piglet.
    My gut told me to take the piglet back to the Jones farm immediately, but I’m a sucker for a cute animal, so I was instantly smitten. I never even heard Danny say, “This will save us a ton of money. We can raise him and then he can provide us this coming winter’s bacon and pork supply.”
    Apparently his words were drowned out by my cooing as I cuddled the adorable piglet in my arms and whispered in his tiny ear, “I’m naming you Bubba.”
    Well, it wasn’t long before Bubba was eating us right out of house and home and costing us our hard-earned savings, which was a pittance to begin with since I was pregnant with my daughter, Gemma, and not working.
    Within a week, Bubba rooted and ate our entire vegetable garden, destroyed every inch of our backyard (which emptied out our already small savings account). We tried satisfying Bubba’s huge appetite with grain from the feed store and any leftovers that we had begged and hoarded from our neighbors and friends.
    Even though Bubba was high maintenance, I still loved the little pig.
    Except he wasn’t so little.
    After eight weeks, he was already a whopping sixty pounds.
    Whenever Bubba’s antics stressed me out, Danny would pipe up and reassure me that it would all be over in a few months and we would be chowing down like kings during the cold winter months!
    Again, I’m not really sure why I didn’t hear this.
    By the time Bubba was six months old, he was a jaw dropping 280 pounds! And he was no longer popular with the neighbors. He had broken through our little wooden fence, trampling and eating Mrs. Gray’s entire prize flower garden. He terrorized some neighbor children who were having their first campout alone in their backyard when he broke down the fence and began rooting around their tent for food, all the while snorting and grunting. The poor kids’ terrified screams about a hideous monster lurking about had every