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Budget cooking: fuck chitlins

Do you know how fucking long it takes to fucking clean ten goddamn pounds of fucking chitterlings ("chitlins")? Well, if you're my punk ass, it takes 2 fucking hours. It's bullshit. I hate it. I'll probably be doing it again next month sometime. "But, ODG," you ask, "why would you even start out dealing with this shit?" Well, let me tell you: chitlins are cheap as fuck. Ten pounds cost me $21. Incidentally, a pound of chicken feet only cost $2. I bought that, too, because I FUCKING HATE MYSELF.

I decided I wanted to create something new and exciting because I'm a fucking moron. I minced up some radish, vidalia onion, and orange or yellow bell pepper. I don't even remember anymore.

Then I also minced up some garlic, red cabbage, parsley, and mushroom because I needed more things to hate about my day. 

Remember the chicken feet? I scraped what little skin, tendon, and fat I could off of the fuckers. That took way too fucking long and I'm never doing it again, though I did eventually work out a little bit of a system to speed the process up:

1. Don't fucking do it.

See? Fast as fuck, boyeeee. But, for real:

  1. Cut the webbing between the fingers
  2. Cut off the fingers (except for the long middle one)
  3. Cutting through the skin on top, run your knife along the bones in a buzzsaw pattern to remove as much of the skin as you can
  4. Cut your fucking thumb because you're a dumbass (optional)
  5. Flip the foot over and repeat the same process to remove the little bit of non bone left
  6. Hate yourself and start the next foot
See how much shit I got out of HALF OF A POUND of the feet? It's really not worth it. I'm gonna do it again real soon.
So after I got all that done, I started up by browning the chicken foot bits and bobbles in butter with some salt and pepper. Well, I tried to brown it. It just kind of got beige.
When I finally got tired of waiting because I'd already been in the kitchen for 5 hours between cleaning, sorting, and bagging the chitlins and scraping next to nothing off the feet, I went ahead and dumped in my veggie mix. I know I'm complaining a lot, but this shit tasted awesome. Definitely doing this many more times.
Once everything was done, I moved it all to a bowl.
I put quite a bit of vegetable oil in my pan
And I wrapped that lovely, tasty mixture up into chitlin-wrapped wontons. Yeah, we doing this shit completely off the rails, no alcohol involved. 
I fried them in the oil for what seemed like forever. One of them actually stayed in a dumpling-like shape and contained the filling, one of them at least ended up shaped like a cup, and the rest of them opened up and dumped everywhere, so I said "fuck it" and threw the spilled filling on top.
I served two of them up alongside some rice I'd cooked with salt and pepper, which was fucking lucky because the chitlins were 100% inedible. It was like chewing (admittedly tasty) rubber. I did a little research after spending way too long trying to gnaw one of them and found that you're supposed to BOIL THAT SHIT FOR TWO HOURS before you fry it. That's what I get for trying something blind, I guess? 
Look at those chitlins (pre-wrapping)...
On the bright side, I've got some plans for trying this again. First off, I'm going to boil the intestines for 2 hours before I do anything else. At that point, I'll evaluate and go one of two ways:
  1. If the chitlins are pliable enough to wrap filling up, I'll be doing everything else about the same way as before
  2. If the chitlins are not pliable enough, I'm going to cut them into 8 squares, use toothpicks to hold them together as a box, fill the box with my filling, then bread the outside and fry that shit. I think that may actually end up working pretty damn well.
I'm going to make fucking chitlin-wrapped chicken foot dumplings because I swear to God nobody else ever has, and I'm gonna do something original if it kills me. And it may. But I bet it tastes pretty damn amazing.
Here's a plating experiment to take that disaster out of your mind. I made a flower out of tomato peel, and a ball out of tomato, and also had edible food with it. #win

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