Pig Feet!

I have never eaten or cooked with pig feet... 

Until now.

After stuffing ourselves at Huang Viet, one of the best eateries in the Eden Center at Falls Church, we moseyed on over to the Grand Fortune market in the same complex to pick ourselves up some groceries for the week.  One day I'm going to look back and realize I take the abundance of ethnic markets in the DC area for granted, although at this very moment, I fully and happily admit to their amazingness.  I enjoy the cheap produce and crazy ingredients it would normally be difficult to locate.  There is an entire aisle devoted to seaweed!  Want to add msg to your food?  They had three different brands in multiple quantities!  Feeling adventurous?  Why not buy a bag of chips with mysterious lettering and the only discernible marker on it a picture of a happy cartoon shrimp! 

Best of all are the meats.  Oh, the meats!  This particular store has a very large fish monger zone, and we have gotten into buying whole fish and having them de scaled and de gutted there (option 2 according to their easy cleaning selection board).  This last visit I decided to check out the butcher case, and quickly had my eye caught by a simple sale sign next to...pig feet!  More specifically, pig feet points, which as far as I can figure are just chopped up pig feet.  Still, at 88¢ a pound, I was sold without even looking at the selection.  I bought a little over two pounds for a whopping $1.82 and wandered back to a waiting Travis with my bag of pig feet points, who wasn't even phased that I was buying them.  He's used to this, after previous H-Mart purchases of kidneys, livers, and hearts (oh my!). 

So we left the Eden Center with our pig feet and boring items like pork belly and whole porgy fish, so I could go home and figure out what to do with them.   Google made me much more dubious than when I started.  It didn't occur to me that pigs actually walk on their feet and therefore walk on some gross...that's my point.  Wash, boil, wash was a common first step that I decided would be very smart.

Related tangent.  I recently read Graham Holiday's memoir that came out in March.  It's really interesting and has gotten me obsessed with Vietnamese street food, hence the visit to Huang Viet so I could satisfy my bahn xeo (Vietnamese stuffed savory crepes) and bun bo hue (spicy beef noodle soup).  This has led me to dumping nuac mam (fish sauce) on everything, and the pig feet were aching for a Vietnamese soak (there probably is a pedicure joke in there).  So my end preparation was to not follow a recipe at all, but to wing it.  Good plan, no?

I dumped rice wine vinegar, beef broth, fish sauce, ginger, garlic, soy sauce, sugar, star anise, and chiles into my crock pot, added my boiled and well-washed feet and let 'em braise for, ah, 8 hours.  I figured longer is better.  I had nuac mam, lettuce leaves, herbs, and some quick-pickled carrots on hand.  Cooked up some rice and we were ready.

The feet smelled...earthy.  Not in a horrible way, like the kidneys-that-reeked-of-urine-even-though-i-kept-soaking-them-and-i-hate-kidneys incident of 2013.  Just in a this-definitely-isn't-pork-chops way.  Travis, ever the optimist, looked at the pot and said, "There is only a 20% chance we're eating those.  We still have hot dogs, right?". Oh, Travis.  The feet had turned into a mishmash of oddly-shaped bones, braised pig skin, and other bits that didn't just completely dissolve into the vat of murky brown stewing juices.  It was intense.

What's a girl to do but grab a spoon and sample?  Holy macaroni, Batman!  It was amazing!  Once you got over the fact it was feet and had a distinct smell, it was astonishingly like pork belly and bone marrow fused into a delightful union.  I can't say it was based on any specific Asian cuisine over another, but the generic concoction was salty/sour/spicy in an eye-popping fashion.  Plus it didn't taste like pee, so definitely a win over the kidney experiment.

I plated it like I would have for braised pork belly, but it was best eaten Vietnamese-style wrapped in lettuce with herbs, veggies, and dipped in pungent nuac mam.  We were sticky, greasy, and stuffed happy campers at the end if the meal.  Sadly no pic could be taken during or after the meal because of said stickiness, but imagine us smiling over empty plates, a bowl of big feet bones, and our hands covered in a sticky sauce.

Yum.