Confession Time - Chicken Guts Edition

When I was growing up, my mother liked to add chopped chicken giblets and livers to her Thanksgiving turkey stuffing. Since we were the only ones in the family who liked this stuff when NOT in the stuffing, she'd cook a few extra and we'd share a private treat together.

(BTW, Mom served the stuffing to an awful lot of people during her long lifetime, and most went back for seconds. Those who grimace at chicken innards by themselves, might find they add a lot to stuffing. After all, how many garlic lovers eat cloves raw?)

Were I a theist, I'd imagine my mother fixing her turkey stuffing in heaven, and sharing that private treat with her favorite saints (Mom was Catholic). I still enjoy the fantasy, and I toast her on the infrequent occasions when I indulge in that treat (red wine, the livers are too strong a flavor to accompany white).

I hate to admit it...but I love Jack in the Box fast food. At one time or another I've pretty much had their entire menu. I especially liked, and it may have been an offering local to Hawaii, the teryaki chicken bowl. I think it may be a good thing they don't have them on the east coast.

I could eat ice cream and only ice cream for days straight. I have absolutely no problem putting away one of those tiny Ben and Jerry's pints in one sitting. Heck I think I even remember one night in college going through almost an entire gallon of snapper ice cream in one sitting without even the slightest beginnings of a sugar coma.

And for fast food...I married into a family of foodies so I'm very ashamed to admit that I absolutely LOVE Taco Bell. I know it's crap and they use the same 7 or so ingredients in each menu offering, but there is just something about their beans and cheese and that pink sauce that goes in the grilled stuffed burrito that pulls me into the drive through lane if I'm within a mile radius of one.

Mandy U

Ive been reading the entries (entrees? heh) and had to go Wha-? Why be guilty about that?

I suppose being from a third world country, I dont feel guilty about eating anything... and everything. In my culture there are things we eat that would make you cringe.

Like this one.

I really like sweetbreads, although I don't eat them very often because a) my doctor gets pissy about it, and b) they're not all that easy to find, either in restaurants or at the grocery store (although the situation is definitely improving). However, when my wife and I were in Argentina couple of years ago we were delighted to discover that the Argentine love of beef extends to organ meats. One of our best meals was lunch at Clark's, a fairly famous restaurant in the Recoleta district of Buenos Aires. It consisted of a beautifully marbled steak, on top of which was a thick slice of grilled pancetta, on top of which were grilled sweetbreads. This was served with a large bowl of french fries and a big green salad. Afterwards we staggered back to our hotel for a nap, but not before calling the restaurant we had dinner reservations at to reschedule for a couple of nights later since there was no way we were having anything more than a salad for dinner that night.

If it's a Midwestern thing to get the innards separately, then Texas is midwestern, because I can go to the grocery and get chicken livers or whatever on their own in containers in the meat section. I'm not one for gizzards (except in dirty rice) but I do love a mess of fried-and-mashed chicken livers, done right with onions and egg and such. NOT something the American Heart Association would ever tag with a seal of approval!

Other things of which I will eat too many if allowed:
- Onion Rings. Properly made with rings of onions and a light batter, NOT breading and NOT chopped onions in dough. Preferably with vinegar and pepper scattered on. I can also eat enough roasted onions to have a stink on for three or four days.
- Texas Twisters, which are a pile of chips made from a single spiral-cut potato. You get them at almost any fair and they are nothing bur crunch and grease and whatever you shake or pour on top.
- Roasted chicken skin. Who doesn't love it when it gets all crispy and brown in the oven? About once or twice a year I roast a chicken and eat the skin for supper, saving the meat for other uses. The meat keeps; the skin does not.
- Fried pickle chips. Chipotle ranch dip optional.
- Boston Blackies mushroom-onion-cheeseburger with onion loaf. This pretty much would give my my cholesterol fix for six months, and was a must stop for a friend of mine when he got to Chicago. I lived around the corner and didn't go too often, on principle.

Note that most of our guilty foods involve quantities of grease. And I wouldn't call mine comfort foods; that is a whole 'nother category. Although the Blackie Burger and chicken skin probably qualify as both.

As fine as the foods previously mentioned sound, I like haggis with a health dash of hot taco sauce. For those who have forgotten, the basic haggis contains all the parts of a sheep that can't be sold to the English minced fine with oatmeal and stuffed in the sheep's stomach. It is, however, bland even with the obligatory tatties and bashed neeps - hence the taco sauce.

Eating haggis is a food weakness that makes many folks avoid your table, once they learn what it is. Some waitresses even refuse to serve it "because of the smell" Tormenting the unexperienced is always a pleasure.

Adding taco sauce at a Burns Night gala, even when you bring a big enough bottle to share, will prove that Scots have no sense of humor when it comes to their national dish. Given the laughs they've gotten over the years watching the guests poke around the edge of the haggis trying to look like they've had some, this small reversal is very entertaining.

Re: Fast food -- I'm a big fan of Arby's roast beef sandwiches. And when I planned a vacation to California a couple of years back, I actually went online and searched out all the El Pollo Loco locations, to make sure my trip took me by at least 3 of them.

As to organ meats, I have that perennial topper story: As a former cowboy, I've eaten bull calf testicles a number of times. They're actually pretty good. No, really.

Growing up in Texas, I had to deal with a bunch of airhead cowboys who thought food — chili, for instance — was a competition. One day I realized " Hey, I don't LIKE this super-hot crap. " And I never ate another bite of hot chili, or raw elk meat, or any of the exotic " Look at me, everybody, I'm eating weird stuff ! " food.

Sushi, though: Yes. A big yes to sushi. That's the food of the gods.

hell, I don't even have time to confess them all!
I'll third Brent though-chorizo and egg burritos are better than great. Almost any breakfast burrito is good in my book, as long as there aren't too many potatoes involved.

As far as something to feel guilty about, I eat more fried chicken than any six people should. Most of my diet is pretty sound these days, but I eat fried chicken every chance I get. It's just so fucking good.
Also, red hot pork cracklins. Not pork rinds or skins(though I love those too,) but the hard fried ones that still have some fat attached and a generous dose of red chili pepper powder. Living in cali and loving all kinds of mexican food, from time to time I also eat the giant slabs of skin with salsa and/or lemon or lime juice. Chayote squash with salt and lemon is good too, and I'm just about the only non-hispanic you'll see eating it around here.
Quick anecdote-I spent a couple of years working in the meat dept. of a natural foods grocery store. Range raised chicken and choice-to-prime beef, the best fucking canadian pork products, sushi quality seafood, etc. The manager had a pretty open policy on disposal of day-olds and end cuts, and we had the chicken rotisserie in the dept, so we were always cooking something. We had slab bacon that we sliced on demand, and when it got to the end, the lean and fat run separately, and it doesn't make good slices. It was a little expensive, so no old ladies tried to buy the ends for cooking. We would trim the smoked fat off and add it to the chorizo we made(nothing adds flavor like smoked pork fat) then we would cook up the lean in the rotisserie. Sometimes it was up to a pound or so of pure, red, applewood smoked lean bacon meat, but it wouldn't last 20 minutes with only two or three of us snacking. It was hilarious, too-the main reason we cooked in the open area of the meat dept. was to get the smell out into the store. This is a natural foods store, with a lot of health products. Filled with rich old skinny ladies, skin-and-bone vegans, college-hippy vegetarians, and a large number of people with chronic health or diet issues and random health food fanatics. You have never seen anything like the look in an intentionally malnourished person's eye when they smell a pound of bacon cooking. The glint in the eye is somewhere between that of a poor child on a bountiful christmas, and a wounded jackal that just stumbled across a baby rabbit. They would always come up and ask what was cooking, I would sell them a nice lean rotisserie chicken, and then I would go eat more bacon. And I never felt guilty about any of it.
Last- Jim, don't feel bad about gizzards of all things. It blows my mind that you can just go buy them as a dish. Living in California, I have to buy the whole chicken to get any giblets, and I do believe that myself and a handful of old mexicans are the only ones left that actually eat them. Since we got a puppy, I grudgingly give him the livers, but those gizzards are for me or the gravy.

ORGAN MEATS-yup I mean "fries" Be they bull,lamb or turkey-not eveyone's fancy but them what likes 'em, really like 'em. And like scotch whisky and cigars, definatly an acquired taste.

when "Jack-in-the Box" pulled out of my part of the great plains. They have a fried taco that was unbelievable. They put all the parts together, seal the edges together and then pitch the lot into the deepfry. Used to be 5 for a buck. Burn your fingers hot, red grease dripping everywhere, major food value was as an internal lubricant.
GODS I miss 'em.
And, like Jim, I'm lucky the nearest White Castle is 6 hours away.

Man, I wish it were just one food for me. I have so many god-dammed guilty pleasures when it comes to eating, it's a wonder I don't weigh 250 lbs.

Oh, wait... I do. Shit.

Seriously, I don't even know where to begin. I guess my guiltiest pleasure is double-cheeseburgers from the $1 menu at McDonald's. I get two at a time. With fries.

/hangs head in shame/

Rob Miles
--
There are only 10 types of people in the world;
those who understand binary and those who don't.

I have an inordinate fondness for chorizo and eggs burros. Made with the greasiest, hottest chorizo I can find, whole eggs, shredded cheese, fresh habanero salsa, and wrapped in a giant flour tortilla made the old fashioned way - with lard. Then I compliment it on the side with fried chincharones (deep fried pork skins).

Ideally the damn thing'll weigh in at around two pounds, be dripping red grease, and be solid enough to use as a doorstop. They run about 4000 calories.

Yeesh. I'm gonna die. ;)

. . . I'm following up the gizzards with a nice fresh salad, will someone offer me absolution for my culinary sin?

Jim Downey

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