Blood + Offal – Page 2 – Writing With My Mouth Full

Filipino Lengua, Tongue Stew

I returned to Chinatown and easily picked up tongue or lengua [leng-gwah]. I picked the veal’s tongue because, well, the pig’s tongue looked like a part of the male anatomy. There is another Spanish-influenced dish, lengua estofada, but I wanted a dish that was more appropriate for spring, so I decided to make something lighter. My mother watched me cook and gave me simple instructions from what she could remember from her aunt, my Apong.

When I unwrapped the tongue, this massive muscle was in front of me and I thought, How the hell do I peel the skin off? After boiling it for about an hour, the skin actually turned white. It looked like a small foot than a tongue! Peeling the skin off was as easy as taking off a sock. Weird, I know, but you’ll see what I mean when you try it.

Ingredients:
1 vealâ€™s tongue, washed thoroughly with salt under cold running water
3 fresh green chili peppers
1 red onion, roughly chopped
3 cloves garlic, minced
2 large tomatoes, halved and sliced
2 tbsps soy sauce
a handful of parsley, finely chopped
salt, pepper, olive oil

1. Simmer tongue in a large pot of water, about 1 hour. Remove from pot and let cool enough to handle. Peel skin from tongue and trim gristle. Cut into 1/4-inch slices.
2. In a large wok, sautÃ© garlic and onions. Add chilis. Add tongue pieces and brown both sides. Stir in soy sauce and tomatoes and cook until soft. Cover and simmer for about 30 minutes until tongue is tender. Season with salt to taste and sprinkle with parsley to serve.

Filipino Bopis, Pig’s Heart Sauté

For a less challenging dish, I skipped over the cow’s penis at Dynasty Supermarket and opted for the pig’s heart instead. I could have used pig’s lungs, too, but they weren’t available during my visit. Moving away from Spain, I chose bopis [boh-peace] to show the Chinese influence in Filipino cooking. The ethnic Chinese settled in the Philippines even before Magellan set foot in 1521. If the Spanish military did not beat the Chinese (and the Japanese, the Dutch and the British, too), the country would have more similarities to China than Spain. Of course, no colonizer had to tell us that bopis is enjoyed with a cold bottle of beer.

Ingredients:
1 pigâ€™s heart, thoroughly washed, boiled, minced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1 onion, finely chopped
4 sprigs of thyme
a handful of parsley, finely chopped
3 green chilis, sliced
1/4 cup of beef broth
1 carrot, finely chopped
1 small radish, finely chopped
1 red bell pepper, finely chopped
1/2 cup vinegar
salt, pepper, oil

1. In a wok, sautÃ© garlic and onion in hot oil. Add heart and season with salt and pepper and chilis. Cook for 5 minutes until golden brown.
2. Add vegetables and vinegar. Boil without stirring. Add beef broth and simmer until liquid evaporates. It’s perfect when you’re scraping brown bits from the bottom of your wok.

Filipino Callos, Tripe Stew with Blood Sausage

To make callos, the main ingredient, honeycomb tripe, was easy to find in Chinatown but I was visiting store to store to find blood sausages. There was no way my version of callos was going to have Vienna sausages from a can. (Honeycomb tripe is the reticulum, the first compartment in the cattle’s stomach.) My trustworthy Spanish deli, DespaÃ±a, was closing for the day when I tried to buy them. The guy at the counter refused to sell them to me because the register closed five minutes before I got there. Talk about customer service. I ended up at Dean & Deluca but the packages on display were all expired. Dean & Deluca not carrying something I needed only meant one thing: I have to go to the Whole Foods at Union Square, the worst place to buy something like blood sausages. But I sucked it up and zigzagged my way through their awfully-designed space, past the beautiful people who don’t appreciate produce as much as they fawn over the buffet and of course, received the expected responses from the clerks behind the counter: what is that?, blood what? and I donâ€™t think we carry those. A stranger overheard me and, bless his heart, tipped me off to a smaller store on Sixth Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets. It was called Jefferson Market and I hit the jackpot with their blood sausages and Spanish chorizos.

I spent a total of five hours roasting beef bones, simmering them and straining the juice into containers until I had proper beef stock. The next day, I scrubbed the fat off the honeycomb tripe and cleaned off a veal’s foot before I boiled them together. The day after that, I finally got to work.

Callos [kahl-yohs], or tripe in Spanish, is a famous dish from Madrid. Like other Spanish dishes, it comes with chorizo and tomatoes. Filipinos adapted the recipe, and after more than 350 years as a Spanish colony, we have made it our own.

Ingredients:
1 pound honeycomb tripe, washed throughly and excess fat trimmed
1 foot of veal, cut in 2-inch pieces, washed and rubbed with salt
2 chorizo de Bilbao, cut into thin slices
2 blood sausages, cut into small pieces
2 cups of beef broth
2 garlics, 1 minced, another whole
2 onions, 1 roughly chopped, another whole
peppercorns
1 bay leaf
2 tomatoes, diced
half a bag of baby carrots
4 small potatoes, peeled, quartered
1 can of chickpeas, drained
1 can of sweet peas, drained
1 red bell pepper, julienned
2 red chili peppers
3 sprigs of rosemary
lemon juice
salt, pepper, olive oil

1. Cook tripe and veal’s foot in a large pot and cover with water. Add whole garlic and onion, peppercorns and bay leaf. Bring to a boil; remove scum as it rises. Cover and simmer until tender, about 4 hours.
2. Transfer the cooked tripe to a plate and cool. Strain the stock and reserve 2 cups for later use. Cut the tripe into 1-inch strips. Discard veal’s foot.
3. In a large Dutch oven, heat the olive oil and sautÃ© the garlic, onions, tomatoes and chili peppers until fragrant. Add the chorizo and brown. Increase heat to high and add the tripe. Add the blood sausages and some of the beef broth. Season with salt and pepper. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for 20 minutes.
4. Uncover the stew and add the potatoes with the rosemary and peppercorns. Add the last of the broth to keep the stew from drying up. Add the rest of the vegetables and cook until tender. Season with salt and pepper. Squeeze some lemon juice before serving.