So trivial, yet it really ticks you off.

[Harp]

Duck is among my favorite foods. Just love it, really, the fattier the better. There’s no real Chinatown here, but there is a sort of pan-Asian retail district a couple miles from our house, where there’s a hole-in-the-wall Cantonese joint with ducks and chickens and slabs of pork hanging in the cases. I fairly frequently buy a whole duck, which the proprietress, a not-young immigrant woman, chops into manageable pieces with her cleaver...

I envy you this convenience.
Chicago does have a Chinatown which I seldom visit, duck with brown fried rice would be a treat.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^^
For 20 years I lived about a five-minute drive (at night, in light traffic) from Seattle’s Chinatown. I knew the district well. Took many a late-night meal there.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Boston's Chinatown is one of my favorite urban haunts. No place around here serves "Hot Pot!" That I didn't get down there last year and probably won't this year is another reason 2020-21 sucks.

 

[Harp]

That I didn't get down there last year and probably won't this year is another reason 2020-21 sucks.

The new year dawns bright with promise. And sprinkle rice with Miltonesque aphorisms regarding the mind
being its own place.... Ruan's Chinese take out rice with chicken purchased elsewhere isn't Peking Duck,
but toss in a bottle of Lancer's Portuguese vino, garlic bread, and the New York Times and presto!

 

[Hercule]

When I was in third grade (it must’ve been) I got sick at school in the afternoon, after having had a liver wurst sandwich for lunch. The little illness had me missing my weekly after-school trip to the bowling alley. The experience put me off liver wurst for years afterwards.

Been there done that!!! I should have known better when the sandwich came back and it was the butt end of the liverwurst.

 

[tonyb]

Boston's Chinatown is one of my favorite urban haunts. No place around here serves "Hot Pot!" That I didn't get down there last year and probably won't this year is another reason 2020-21 sucks.

I visited there going on 20 years ago. It was a feast for the eyes.

My friend Dean Wong, a photographer who worked for newspapers and has had a couple books published by the University of Washington Press, has done some traveling about the country capturing images of what remains of the Chinatowns. He’s been widowed for a few years (lung cancer did Jan in) and his closest friend, Donnie Chin, a longtime Chinatown peacemaker, got gunned down in the street in 2015, a murder which is still unsolved. So Dino tries to keep busy, to keep from wallowing in his sorrow. I’m proud to call him a friend. He’s a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kinda guy.

 

[tonyb]

Does anyone here actually like pork chitterlings, aka chitlins? I’ve partaken maybe a couple times in my life and had difficulty choking down more than a forkful.

Is there a palatable way to prepare chitlins?

 

[Turnip]

Try this one...

http://www.all-about-portugal.com/tripas-a-moda-do-porto-recipe/

 

[Trenchfriend]

See, this a bad point about old Germany!
Many people here still have their oven down in the kitchen furniture, not at chest height.

Now, I really bumped TWICE against the total open hatch with my lower leg, while entering the kitchen. But I did the best I could. Coldest water immediately and cool-pack from the freezer, after.

Jeeesus!! But the swellings enjoyed the cooling visible and relaxed. Good, that I had my home pants on.

 

[tonyb]

Try this one...

http://www.all-about-portugal.com/tripas-a-moda-do-porto-recipe/

Yeah, that’s a tripe recipe. (Sounds delicious, by the way.) There may be different definitions of tripe in different places (I wouldn’t know), but around here tripe is stomach. It’s the one indispensable ingredient in a delightful Mexican dish called menudo, a tripe soup and purported hangover cure. I love the stuff. Not everyone shares that opinion. I suspect that for many in the latter category, it’s the appearance and texture they find off-putting.

Chitlins, or chitterlings, is pig intestines. In my highly limited experience of chitlins, it tastes like what I suspect its one-time contents tastes like.

 

[Hercule]

Yeah, that’s a tripe recipe. (Sounds delicious, by the way.) There may be different definitions of tripe in different places (I wouldn’t know), but around here tripe is stomach. It’s the one indispensable ingredient in a delightful Mexican dish called menudo, a tripe soup and purported hangover cure. I love the stuff. Not everyone shares that opinion. I suspect that for many in the latter category, it’s the appearance and texture they find off-putting.

Chitlins, or chitterlings, is pig intestines. In my highly limited experience of chitlins, it tastes like what I suspect its one-time contents tastes like.

Not many (in day to day life) even know what tripe is, and far fewer have ever had it. For me it was one of the comfort foods I spoke of earlier, probably because my grand mother made it - battered and fried, pickled tripe though.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^
Tripe’s flavor is mild, subtle, and takes the flavors of whatever it’s prepared with.

Among my criteria for judging Mexican restaurants is the quality of their menudo, if it’s on the menu at all.

 

[Turnip]

Yeah, that’s a tripe recipe. (Sounds delicious, by the way.) There may be different definitions of tripe in different places (I wouldn’t know), but around here tripe is stomach...

Chitlins, or chitterlings, is pig intestines. In my highly limited experience of chitlins, it tastes like what I suspect its one-time contents tastes like.

Yes, that’s certainly right, both translate to not closer defined „insides“ here. Could also mean one organ or several, from cattle or pig, sheep...

By the way, here’s another German classic, Palatine stuffed (pig) stomach. Tastes really great and will be available in almost any German restaurant there. Cut to slices, then fried in a pan, tastes also great just cold with dark grey bread.

Cheers

Turnip

 

[tonyb]

“Tripe” also means something like “nonsense, balderdash, rubbish, BS, etc.”

It’s not often heard, but it isn’t all that obscure a term, either.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Not many (in day to day life) even know what tripe is, and far fewer have ever had it. For me it was one of the comfort foods I spoke of earlier, probably because my grand mother made it - battered and fried, pickled tripe though.

One of my most vivid young-childhood memories (I must've been about two) is of a plate of tripe flying across the kitchen crashing against the wall behind the sink, with the plate shattering and the tripe oozing slowly down the wall. My father did not care for tripe. Especially not boiled tripe. My mother's reply to this incident was something like "you don't like tripe? Getta g-d job."

 

[Tiki Tom]

Exactly. One of my friends in high school had a father who insisted that steak be served every Friday evening. The reason? That meant they had “made it.” For some reason, that story always stuck with me. ...Mainly, I guess, because —-even then—- I realized it was possible to get you priorities all screwed up.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^
I was brought up under the tutelage of a fellow who was waaaay too taken with the trappings of “success,” such that he acquired cars, boats, etc. he really couldn’t afford as soon as he could make the down payment, or finagle some other way to get his paws on the goods. (Give the devil his due: he talked a good game. At times it was thing of real beauty.) That habit, as much as anything, is what kept him perpetually one step removed from outright destitution.

 

[LizzieMaine]

That, alas, was my uncle's way of looking at the world. He died at 46, after running up thousands of dollars in debts for such playthings, possibly because he expected to die young -- he'd had rheumatic fever as a kid, and his clock was ticking -- and figured "well, why not?" Unfortunately this also made him a mark for every con man and slick promoter who walked in the door, and his parents hastened their own march to the grave by having to keep bailing him out.

 

[tonyb]

^^^^
I can’t say that the Old Man’s ways didn’t rub off on me, at least to some extent. I’ve spent my entire adult life unlearning those lessons, often the hard way. I cringe when I recall some of the stupid, stupid, stupid purchases I’ve made.

I’m still attracted to “nice things,” but I have more than enough of those things now, and I know that whatever lift this person might experience at the acquisition of some new (or old) nice thing will wear off before long. The reason I can now afford the sorts of things I used to lust after is because I rarely buy those sorts of things.

 

[GHT]

Chitlins, or chitterlings, is pig intestines. In my highly limited experience of chitlins, it tastes like what I suspect its one-time contents tastes like.