Day 19: Not a Mamma’s Boy… I Swear!

After last night’s dinner, breakfast was the last thing on my mind.  Seriously, that pig head was rich…and I slept in.

Lunch was sandwiches of leftover pig’s head ; mostly cheeks, but some other assorted tasty bits as well.  As was my usual program, I offered to share with some co-workers, but my apparently my description was less than appetizing... I referred to them as “pig face sandwiches”.  Peter (the originator of the Jellvis) told me that I wasn’t doing a good job of selling them, I should have just called them pork sandwiches.  That struck me as slightly disingenuous; after all, they were made of pig’s face, and I wouldn’t have felt right, you know, lying about it.

But wherever the pork came from, it didn’t matter, each part of the pig is delicious… and so were the sandwiches.  Combined with nothing more than a toasted bun, some salt and a slice of creamy Havarti cheese, they were the stuff of dreams.  The kind of sandwich that you’d push your friend off a bridge for…and then you’d tell the authorities that he jumped...chasing after a sandwich.

The real truth is that I’d been doing a lot of cooking, and even though it’s one of my favourite past-times, I was getting fatigued.  I needed a simple dinner that required absolutely no thinking and I knew just the place to find it: my local Vietnamese grocery store.  There I would find all manner of pork dumplings; I stocked up.  And as I walked past the meat counter I spotted some pig hearts.  I had read about and wanted to make pig heart burgers, but the butcher said that he couldn’t grind them for me…he didn’t care to expand on why he couldn’t and I didn’t care to engage in a long and pointless conversation about how pig heart was no different than any other meat that he would grind up so there was no real reason why he couldn’t do it other than him being a lazy ass…but I digress.  Hell, I’d just stew them.  He bagged two of them for me.

As I pulled off the highway, I turned left instead of right.  I wanted ground heart, and ground heart is what I would get.  My comparatively ill equipped kitchen couldn’t deliver the product, but I knew somebody’s who could… my mother.

Now, I’m no mamma’s boy, and I don’t show up at my parents’ house with an empty stomach, and I never expect a meal… but one would be foolish to refuse something they enjoy so much.  And what a co-incidence it was when I found my parents sitting down to a late dinner of pappardelle with a pork tomato sauce.  I added an Asian twist and we also made some of the pork and watercress dumplings, and while they were good, the prepackaged stuff couldn’t hold a candle to the pappardelle. 

Pappardelle al'maiale

Pork and watercress dumplings.  Funny, I didn't taste watercress.

I finally moved on to the reason I came and got to work grinding one of the hearts with my mom’s food processor.  Add in a touch of onion, a touch of garlic and some parsley and you’ve got the base for a hamburger…or meatballs; whatever your heart desires.

Almost heart-shaped pig hearts

Ready for heart burgers