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Budget cooking: finishing the chitlins

I finally did it. After 2 and a half weeks and 30 meals, I made it all the way through my 10 pound bucket of pork chitterlings. Despite catastrophic failure with my first attempt, it's been a pretty fun journey. I learned some good lessons, tried some simple classics, and even pretended to be exotic; however, all things must at some point come to an end, and this bucket was ready.

I spent a little bit of time trying to figure out how I wanted to finish things up. The wontons were really good, and breading and frying with cayenne is a surefire hit, but I wanted to keep trying different things. I diced some onion, sliced some garlic, and minced some yellow bell pepper, radish, and mushroom while my chitlins pressure cooked. After the meat...is it meat? I don't fucking know. After the chitlins were done, I chopped them up, too.

Meanwhile, I had my rice cooker going with, you guessed it: rice. I also tossed the steamer basket on top and threw some red cabbage leaves in there. I didn't want to fully steam the cabbage; just wanted them to have some give.

I got the chitlins going in some butter, and, once they were ready to just sit and crisp a little, I dropped my onion and garlic onto the opposite side of the pan to let them sweat.

Once that was all getting close to where I wanted it, I dumped in the rest of my veggies and let it all cook together for a few minutes. A little salt, a little pepper, and some butter and oil, and we were good to go.

This is where the fun part came in. I used the cabbage leaves to wrap up a ball of rice and a few spoonfuls of the chitlin/veggie mix. My original plan was to fry the cabbage around the mix because frying things is always great and never bites me in the ass. Turns out, it doesn't work like that, so, after fucking up the first wrap, I just used the steamed cabbage and dealt with the fact that it wasn't the texture (or flavor, to be honest) that I was going for.

While all of this other nonsense was happening, I kept a small pot on low heat on the backburner simmering and slowly reducing my "sauce." For the sauce, I melted about a tablespoon of butter, then added some soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, honey, and toasted sesame seeds. When it had cooked down a little, I added in another tablespoon or so of butter, mixed it all up, and took it off the heat.

Plating was simple. I laid my wrap diagonally and spooned a bit of the sauce over the top. The sauce flavor was okay. Like, the different flavors did work well together, but the ratios were off. I'll work on refining that more later. The filling was delectable, but the cabbage was just kind of meh. It's steamed cabbage with a little salt, nothing groundbreaking. I'll probably do something similar with chicken soon and try to get that sauce better for it, too, but, in the meantime, I'm just glad to be able to cook something besides chitlins for a little while. 

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