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Budget cooking: chitlins fucking ROCK

Last time I tried to make chitlin-wrapped wontons, it was an inedible disaster. So, this time, I boiled the chitlins for 2 hours before doing anything else. 

I seasoned up the boil with a bit of salt, some peppercorns, and a few bay leaves.

After the boiling was done, I drained the chitlins and stuck them in a plastic bowl for the night to cook up the next day.

Aside from that, everything else followed pretty much the same pattern. I diced/minced up a couple radishes, a slice of vidalia onion, four cloves of garlic, a couple mushrooms, some green bell pepper, and a few thin slices of roma tomato.

I also tossed in a red cabbage leaf. 

All of those veggies were lightly sautéed in butter with a little salt and pepper.

While those veggies were cooking, I laid out the chitlins and tried to figure out how to wrap the veggies up with them. I eventually settled on wrapping the veggies in one piece, wrapping a second piece around the bottom, and skewering them together.

After that, it was simply a matter of frying the wontons in vegetable oil. I did encounter a few key issues that I'll need to work on later:

  1. Hot vegetable oil is fucking hot, and it likes to spit itself at you
  2. Apparently, chitlins like to bubble up when they're cooking in oil. You can safely pop those bubbles with a wooden spoon without spraying boiling oil all over your face, but avoiding that issue in the first place would definitely be preferable (and less frightening)
I just had to turn them a few times as they got crispy. I ended up serving them on a bed of rice with a little Japanese barbecue sauce.
The important part, though? They were fucking delicious. Not just edible - scrumptious! So, yeah, there are a few kinks to work out, but I definitely call this a raging success. Can't wait to make this again someday soon, but, in the meantime, I'm going to keep cooking chitlins lots of other ways.

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