Part of dumpstering is about being adventurous. So, when I dumpstered some chicken hearts and gizzards, I figured "why not?" I hadn't ever eaten those parts of a chicken before, but I'm all for the nose-to-tail philosophy in cooking, which espouses that we should try to use every part of an animal to prevent waste and/or justify its death. In fact, nose-to-tail is the dumpstering of the butchery business - finding a use for parts of the animal that otherwise would go into a trashcan, then into a landfill.
My search for "traditional" recipes using chicken hearts and gizzards was a fruitful one. Unfortunately, almost all of the recipes involved deep frying them to create a Southern-style soul food dish that looked like a heart attack on a plate. It wasn't what I wanted to be eating for dinner.
So, I kept searching until I found a concise, slightly more healthy looking recipe on a pretty well-produced food blog. The blog's author, Ling Li, waxes nostalgic about her experience with the nose-to-tail concept in an Asian-American household (a culture in which the idea is less hot topic and more of an absolute). She presents a delicious version of Japanese yakitori. Here's the link, because 100% of the credit should go her way. The only exception I made was omitting the scallions (because I didn't have any):
http://linglieats.com/2011/05/chicken-gizzard-heart-yakitori/
Items not dumpstered or donated: Garlic, mirin
No comments:
Post a Comment