[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

Pork cracklings are one of those foods I can't keep in the house, along with potato chips and cereal. All three of course belong in the crispy-crunchy family, for which I have a deep fondness. (Will it break into little shards in my mouth? Then yes, please!)

I simply lose control over and cannot be trusted when snacking on cracklings. But what if you used cracklings as an ingredient in a dish? That way you eat only a portioned amount (that is, in principle.) I got the idea in San Antonio, while dining at La Gloria, a restaurant devoted to Mexican street food and run by chef Johnny Hernandez.

La Gloria's chicharron sopes.

Midway into the meal, the chef sent out small plates on which even smaller plates seemed to nest. The smaller "plates" were actually rounds of fried masa (corn dough) called sopes. What a genius idea, to make an edible plate on top of which more items can be piled.

The sopes contained chicharrones simmered until very tender and sopping with the juices of tomatoes and tomatillos and chilies. You get the crunch of the corn patty, the softness of the chicharrones, the sauce that pools and spreads to the rims of the sopes. Also, queso fresco. And crema. So many delicious things piled into one little corn vehicle.

Naturally when I got home I set out to replicate the feel of the dish. The kind of rinds at La Gloria are an involved affair, and I couldn't wait that long to eat more cracklings. It was the perfect excuse to buy my beloved deep-fried pork rinds, the sort you can get at Mexican grocery stores (or, yes, I have even succumbed to their siren call at Walmart and gas stations all over the country.)

I recreated chef Hernandez's sauce, smoky and spicy with these canned chili in adobo (one of my favorite last-minute additions to a stew). Then I added the cracklings. Over multiple batches, I've found that my preferred cooking time is about three minutes, from when the chicharrones hit the sauce until you serve them. Cooked for such a short period, the cracklings retain a bit of their crispy deep-fried goodness.

Now, if you live somewhere where these cracklings are not available, you can also use fresh pork belly, using this method I wrote about a few years ago, courtesy of Kenji. (It will not be the same, but you will still get the general feel of crispy pork softened by delicious sauce.)

Sopes, by the way, are really fun to make. Using the same masa mixture you'd use to fashion homemade tortillas, you can instead make these disc-like things by molding the rims once they are halfway cooked. To do so, grab the browning rounds of dough off the griddle, form the rim with your fingertips, and put them back on the griddle to finish cooking. Ouch. But worth it.

Of course, if you're not inclined to burn your digits, you can serve stewed rinds any which way: in tortillas, atop rice and beans, or scrambled with eggs. Possibilities abound.

Finally, a note on sopes: The street snack can be found in innumerable incarnations in Mexico but always begin with a pan-fried corn base of some kind, which holds beans, cheese, red or green salsa, and often meat or some other featured filling. They go by various other names (pelliscada, memela) and appear in various other forms and shapes.

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Chicharrones Guisados (Stewed Fried Pork Rinds) »

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photographs: Robyn Lee]

I bet you've never looked at your Thanksgiving stuffing and thought, gee, wouldn't it be ten times better if it had liver in it?

Stuffing, after all, is already a perfect food. It is a carb, but made tender and good by the essence of meat. It contains loads of butter, and sometimes, eggs. So it is a kind of custard, or basically.

In fact I'm of the opinion that stuffing is, hands down, the best thing about Thanksgiving. Not the turkey, because I can get my crispy skin on any old day. Not the pie, because it is acceptable to eat pie year-round. But stuffing really only shows up around the holidays, and this, for the life of me, is something I will never understand.

I remember eating stuffing as a little girl, maybe a few years out of China, and thinking, why don't you Americans eat stuffing every day, it is just so incredibly good?

But take my word for it: if you love stuffing, and you happen to love or even like liver, then your Thanksgiving stuffing will be indeed be made ten times better with the addition of liver.

The liver enriches the dish in a way that no other cut of meat can. Sausage can't hold a candle to liver in terms of an accompaniment, because it's still a separate ingredient from stuffing, whereas liver invades stuffing. It is like the alien that invades the host, until the two are one and the same.

Puréed liver and stock.

You do this, by first sauteing a few livers, then pureeing them with some of the stock that goes to moisten the bread. In this way, you get liver-flavored bread, and if you don't think that would be any good, well, just think about pâté, think of foie gras, and how very rich and creamy and delicious are these liver products.

Now I must confess that Ben Fishner is the progenitor of liver stuffing, an idea he got when he thought about making stuffing with giblets.

Ben, for his trials, used two to three chicken livers in his liver purée. But for this batch, I had at least five or six livers in the pan. (Operating under the presumption that more livers = more liver taste.) I sautéed them in lots of butter, then mixed in Ben's excellent homemade chicken stock, and the eggs. Puréed the whole thing until it was chunky-smooth, because I wanted to leave a clear indication of the liver involved. The result was this very rich liquid that I sipped and sipped, until Ben reminded me that we were supposed to be using said liquid for the stuffing. (He also said, upon seeing the utter gustatory pleasure I took in sipping, that "they sure broke the mold when they made you," which was just about the nicest thing someone had said to me in a long time.)

The rest is history. The mixture baked beautifully—crispy on the surface, all custard-like in the center. The tiny bits of liver which I had left un-pureed adhered to the bread like little pats of smeared pate. It was rich and intensely liver-y. And, just to be a glutton, I seared another couple of chicken livers, until the centers were just cooked, until they had just ceased to be blood-red, and served them alongside the liver. (Turkey? What turkey?)

And as for the stuffing leftovers, well, I am having trouble deciding whether I love it better hot or cold. I love it pan-fried in the skillet, but it is also extremely good right out the fridge. Pan-fried, it tastes decidedly bread-like. But cold? Cold, it bears an uncanny resemblance to pâté. So much so that I had a plate of it with a glass of wine, and felt very indulgent indeed.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

Xian Famous Foods in New York City specializes in, as its name might suggest, the famous foods of Xian in Northern China. The restaurant is known for its great noodles, buns, and meat. Most of all, its sauce—the spicy, oily, tongue-numbing, chock-full-of-cumin sauce, of which some iteration coats most everything the restaurant makes.

These noodles. And these noodles. And this "spicy and tingly lamb's face salad."

You are eating a whole lamb's head, but this salad disguises it nicely. Not that everyone would need a disguise, but probably not everyone looks at a lamb's head and thinks of all its disparate parts and delicious glory: the cheeks, the tongue, that slip of especially tender meat behind the eye balls, the eyeballs, and every gelatinous bit in between.

Probably, most people just look at a lamb's head and think, wow, that sure is a head. Once, I brought two heads over to the house of the two friends (married, both vegetarians, wonderful, first-rate people) and they let me roast the heads in their oven. When they were done roasting, I just set them on platters and served it forth, thinking that they were going to be a big hit.

Well, practically no one at the party, not even the meat-eaters, touched the heads. At first I thought the problem might be with presentation, so I rearranged the heads so that they weren't just standing on the plate, and I carved the succulent cheek meat, deboning what I could. I "artfully" arranged plates and forks around the heads. Still, no takers.

I think I ended up eating most of the cheek meat myself, and took the heads back home with me that evening for leftovers. But it was just such a let-down, because I had meant for everyone to share in the joy of a lamb's head.

Anyway, if I had to do it all over again, I would, first of all......not bring them to a households of vegetarians. And instead of roasting them whole, I would braise, debone, and dress the meat in the way that XianFamous Foods does.

Ah, the sauce. The famous sauce of Xian Famous Foods. It contains, though in amounts that I can only hope to approximate, never replicate: cumin, star anise, cinnamon, roasted chili oil, soy sauce, black vinegar, probably sugar. Maybe, a little spoonful of tahini, for a certain roasted depth of flavor.

You dress the meat in this sauce, along with your choice of vegetal matter. Xian FF uses parboiled bean sprouts, raw cucumber, and celery. It's a good combination, the juicy crunch of the vegetables acting as a foil for all the rich slices of tongue, cheek, and whatever else you choose to take from the head and put into the salad. (I would also not say no to thinly sliced radish, raw snap peas, so forth - whatever is seasonal and crispy and good.)

If I had my druthers, I'd keep a bottle of this in my fridge at all times to douse it on most things, not just lamb's heads. Noodles, rice, vegetables, other meats, you know, everything. It's just such a good sauce.

Some advice: Try not to eat the sauce every day, as I have been doing for the past two weeks. You don't think you'll get sick of it, but you'll hit a limit, sooner or later.

Also, it can get a little messy, peeling all the lamb-y bits off the skull to put into the salad bowl. (An errant eyeball here, a lopped-off tongue there. The detached lower jaw, resplendent with teeth.) So I would not do the deed in front of the your squeamish friends and loved ones, as by the end it can look pretty serial-killer-like in the kitchen.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photograph: Chichi Wang]

Bowl-steamed pork belly is one of those Chinese dishes that's so wonderfully complex and convoluted that you just have to surrender to its demands, if you are to properly cook it at all.

The dish has seven steps, many of which are timely and labor-intensive. You start with a slab of fresh pork belly, which must be blanched, fried, soaked, sliced, stuffed with delicious things, and steamed. I count seven steps, in all, give or take.

It is an awful lot of work for one dish, I'll admit. But I want to at least attempt to convince you that it's worth it.

Without further ado:

1. Blanch a whole piece of pork belly.

2: Fry the skin in a wok.

Look how crispy the skin gets:

3. Take that crispy skin, and make it all wet by soaking it in water.

(Note the puffiness.)

4. Slice the belly thinly, so that each slice has some skin attached.

5. Line up all the slices in a bowl.

6. Top with various accoutrements.

Pickled chilies, pickled mustard greens or mustard green stems, sliced jalapenos or other chilies, and fermented black beans. If you have room, cram some cooked glutinous rice on the very top. You won't be sorry. (This dish, by the way, shows up in several Chinese provinces, and depending on where you are, the flavorings are different. In Sichuan, they use ya cai in the center. In Shanghai, another pickled green may be substituted.)

7. Steam the bowl for two hours.

8. Invert the bowl onto a plate. Eat.

What's astounding about the dish is how very different the layers of meat, fat, and skin taste from when you first started. The lard will render out, leaving the fat of the belly as a translucent web of tissue, more form than substance. It does not taste like the fat in bacon; rather, the has a spongy and light quality to it. And the skin really tastes like tofu skin, if only tofu skin grew on pigs.

And what about the flesh itself? It is spicy and savory. It has a depth that can only be gotten with all those pickled, spicy goods in the center, which during steaming will have commingled with the meat. The black beans will be soft and earthy, good to eat between bites of rice.

One thing that goes into the stuffing is pickled mustard greens (the specific type varies, from Sichuanese ya cai to Shanghainese mei gan cai). When the pork belly steams, its fat renders right into the pickled greens, which in turn become soft and engorged with lard. It's so, so good. And maybe bad for you in large amounts.

My mother doesn't let my grandmother eat the lard-soaked centers anymore, but my grandmother aptly points out that she didn't live through a Japanese invasion and two famines just to be deprived of her lard, now, at this advanced stage in her life. I think that's about right. Amongst lovers of lard, there should be something like the famine exception, permitting any and all future consumption of lard.

Note: If you do not have access to Chinese pickled greens, but most other ingredients, substitute the pickled greens with more cooked glutinous rice and increase the soy sauce by one more teaspoon.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photograph: Chichi Wang]

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in Momofuku with friends eating a whole pork shoulder, slow roasted so the skin turns out crispy and the flesh very tender, and served with rice, kimchi, and scallion oil. At the restaurant, bowls of bibb lettuce were arranged as though they were flower petals, too beautiful to be eaten. (But then, you know, we did, using the leaves as wrappers for the pork.)

I was enjoying myself immensely except for one tiny problem: there wasn't enough skin to go around the table. We were eight diners in all, and there was only the skin that covered one section of the shoulder. It's the same problem you run into with a whole roast chicken, I guess. But at least with a whole roast chicken you get the pleasure of cartilage and tendon (the very end of the drumstick that not everyone eats), whereas the shoulder was just a whole lotta flesh.

Naturally, I began plotting what I would do if I wanted to reverse the meat to skin ratio, keeping the same Momofuku-inspired preparation. I thought of using only trotters, but that would be taking it too far because there is nary a section of flesh in there. Add the lower hock, though, and you're in business. Then you get the flesh from the hock, and all the tendons and skin from the trotters.

I went to Chinatown, where you can get your legs uncut from the lower hock down. The butcher asked me if I wanted the legs cut up and I said, no, and he looked at me in disbelief. I couldn't understand why. Surely I couldn't have been the only customer with such a request.

Anyway, I took the hock/trotters home, rubbed on the salt and sugar, went to bed, got up the next day, stuck the pork into the oven, read for a few hours, took a nap. When I woke up, the kitchen smelled of sweet, sweet pork. (Yes, it was a very fine day.)

The preparation was as simple as it is delicious, and there was more than enough crispy skin for everyone. Not only that, but the tendons had become soft and gelatinous, a real textural treat.

One thing I didn't take into consideration, however, is just how many bones there are in the trotter. It didn't bother me, but I can see how not everyone might want to deal with all those little bones. But you can't get everything all the time. You have to choose what's right for you, and I'll take bony parts over lots of meat, any day of the week.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

For this recipe I walked down the long expanse of the butcher counter thinking to myself, now what could I cram into a pot with tomatoes and onions, and make tasty?

Sugo all'Amatriciana is usually made with guanciale, or unsmoked pork jowl, but I wanted to see what would happen if I used any smoked pork, plus a fresh cut. The results were mighty good. The fresh cuts, especially with skin and bones, gave body to the sauce. The smoked parts added depth.

A word of warning: Taste your smoked parts or adjust the amount you use depending on how smoky your cut is. You want a sauce that tastes just a little smoky, but not so much so that you feel like you're eating tomato sauce that's been simmered in a smoke pit.

I love the way the sauce gets thickened with the pork. The fresh cuts, you may leave intact once they are done stewing with the tomatoes and onions. (I used hock, but you could also use trotters or necks.) The smoked parts can be defatted, then chopped roughly, so that you get a pebbly sort of mixture that clings to the pasta.

In preparation for this sauce, I wandered down the aisles of the pasta section and treated myself to superfluous boxes, all in short and interesting shapes that would pair well with the sugo. Pig parts sugo with cavatappi. Pig parts sugo with bucatini. Pig parts sugo with orecchiette. It's senseless trying to pick just one to call your favorite. They're all so good.

Although, I do especially like the way the orecchiette ears hold a little bit of the sauce in their indentation, as though they were tiny bowls within my bowl. (I'm not calling them my absolute favorite; I'm just pointing out something I like about them.) And I feel so lucky that I am one of those people who are extremely delighted by the variety of Italian pastas out there, because it is such an easy mood booster.

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Pig Parts Sugo »

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

Last week I acquired, through no real doing of my own, beef scraps from various friends and places. It started with a bag that Kenji gave me, along with one long section of a rib bone. Then there was this brisket event I attended. We lined up for brisket and all the fixin's and everybody got a half pound, which is really more meat than I can handle in one sitting. So I took my leftover brisket to go, and those bits of smoky beef went into the pot too.

I planned to make sukiyaki, usually comprised of thin slices of fatty round eye, browned a little in oil before being simmered in a broth of soy sauce and mirin, along with vegetables, tofu, udon or soba, and what have you. But you see the general idea, that fatty beef tastes good with soy sauce and mirin.

So I simmered the scraps for two hours with a bottle of sake and some water. The rib bone Kenji gave me was so long I couldn't quite close the lid, but then I figured out that I could prop the lid just so on the bone and have the broth simmering at just the right pace. When the beef was cooked, I added the pieces of smoked brisket.

The day after, I de-fatted the broth by taking off the layer of beef fat that had risen to the top. I really like tallow. When it hardens, it looks and feels just like soap.

To the bubbling broth, I added cube tofu, greens, noodles. You are supposed to dip your pieces of beef in beaten egg, the last enrich-er before the meat makes it into your mouth.

My, but it was just so wonderful. The raw beef I'd stewed was fatty and tender. The pieces of smoked brisket had given up some of their smokiness to the sweet and savory broth, yet the meat was still flavorful. My favorite parts were the little scraps that were just the right mix of fat flecked with tendon. And coating everything in egg? Genius.

I wished that I had more scraps to make into beef trim sukiyaki. It made me intensely sad, just thinking that this pot of sukiyaki wouldn't last forever. Then it occurred to me that trim is pretty easy to come by at a butcher shop, and so the next time a craving hits, I wouldn't have to wait for beef scraps from friends. I could just go out and get my own scraps. That was nice thing to realize, in my moment of need.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

What can you do with a pig's foot, lemongrass, and a few bird's eye chilies? Make trotter tom yum, that's what! Imagine the spicy and sour flavors of tom yum with the richness of pork.

The lemongrass, galangal, and chilies impart their bright flavors; the gelatinous trotter stock mellows it out in the best way.

The first time I had this soup, I ordered it at a Thai restaurant. The soup was perfectly balanced, the vegetables perfectly simmered, but the trotters were unappealingly hard. I complained about it to a friend who said, "Well, that's no good. That'd be like having a foot fetish or something." This comment made no sense to me until I really thought about it, and actually my friend was right. If you don't stew the trotters for long enough, chunks of pig's feet in an otherwise delicate soup would be incongruous. But simmered until very soft, the trotters meld into the soup.

Now as some of you may know from having read my latest column, I have been experiencing some cataclysmic changes in my relationship with offal, and for the most part, I am still refraining from the sort of cuts that used to give me such pleasure. But this trotters soup was a dish that I could stomach, mostly because the meat slips right off the bone when you simmer it for so long.

Of course, the soup could be made with any cut of pork that could be long simmered: ribs, neck, hocks, and so on. But trotters and tom yum is such a winning combination that it makes me wonder what other famous soups could take a pig's foot.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

Now I hate using this column as a personal platform for all my food neuroses, but here goes. As some of you may know, I started this column three years on the hunch that there would be an audience for the sort of cuts on the animal that I grew up eating—stomachs and livers, ears and hocks.

Probably one of the first solid foods I ate as a kid was neck bone, stewed in a soup with ginger and rice wine. The soup was flecked with all these bits of cartilage and tendon that took me the better part of an hour to gnaw clean. And I have been very grateful all these years later to find a whole community of eaters who share my love of these sorts of cuts.

So, in a way, I feel it appropriate to turn to you now with some not so great news. For over a week now, I have not wanted to eat offal, or meat of any kind. You could see how this could be problematic for anyone, but for me in particular it's been next to catastrophic. These neck bones, which I had marinated in fish sauce and sugar, were the last bits of meat I truly enjoyed. They were roasted, then served with a spicy tamarind dipping sauce—just the right complement for the fatty cut.

What happened after I ate these bones was this: I threw them in the trashcan and neglected to take out the trash that evening. That evening I set about my nightly routine—which involves a stack of books that I am reading at any given time—and about three books in, I heard an awful rustling from the trashcan, and looked up just in time to see a mouse leap out, darting into the corner. My roommate came into my room to find me almost crying in bed and pointing uselessly to the general vicinity of the trash.

I watched my roommate set all the traps. I watched him gingerly set down the traps while I stayed in the kitchen, cowering. A mere ten minutes later, the mouse was caught and disposed of...by my roommate. That night I lay there, still traumatized, and when I awoke the next morning, I found that I had no appetite for anything. Nada. Zilch. (If you are curious as to what I did manage to stomach, you can read about it on my weekly noodle column for Serious Eats New York.) For days I tried to make light of the matter. So what if the mouse turned into a pile of blood and guts when it died? Great! I love eating blood and guts. One of my favorite breakfast foods in Shanghai, city of my birth, is chicken blood soup, where cubes of congealed chicken blood, as soft as silken tofu, are simmered in a clear chicken broth. And you all know of my fondness for stomachs, either stir-fried with onions, or simmered and crisped up to be used as a filling for tacos.

But no, I haven't eaten a good piece of liver in over week, which is actually kind of a first for me. I always feel like a good piece of liver. Or at least, I did.

A few days after the whole mouse incident, I made up another batch of these neck bones, which can be either roasted or grilled. The meat was charred slightly on the outside, and tender inside—segments of meat that did not flake off the bone, but just about. And the sauce was tart and sweet, spicy and salty. In other words, there was nothing more I could have done to make that pork neck better, and still I did not care to gnaw, or even eat it once I'd deboned everything.

I don't know what I'll do if I never want to gnaw on bones again. I really don't want to think about it, but I'll tell you, I'm getting pretty concerned.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

One thing I have noticed about tongue is its ability to muffle acidic or sour flavors. Sauces that might taste quite tart with most other things taste so extremely good with tongue. Tongue, smothered in tomatillo sauce. Cold deli-style tongue with lots of horseradish and mustard. Tongue salad, in a very sharp vinaigrette.

This here tongue sandwich operates on much the same principle. It's an adaption of one by chef April Bloomfield. With grilled tongue, she pairs horseradish, bitter greens, and green sauce. It's one of the nicest tongue and sauce combinations I've ever had. It's so good because the acidic sauce is spot-on, a mixture of finely chopped herbs or parsley, with garlic, anchovies, mustard, and lots of red wine vinegar. The original recipe calls for tarragon, but I like it just as much as with sage or parsley.

Bloomfield says of the sauce that it keeps you wanting more and more bites of the tongue, or rather, that every hit of the sour sauce prepares you for another bite of the rich fatty muscle. Makes sense, right?

The original recipe called for grilling the tongue, but lacking a grill, I browned thick slabs of the tongue in my cast iron skillet, until the surface of the tongue was very dark brown and almost crackly, like pork rinds. The sauce cut daggers into the fatty organ, and so I ate slab after slab of the tongue, and was indeed continually interested in doing so.

The sauce is something special. What goes into it? Olive oil, red wine vinegar-soaked bread crumbs, capers, anchovies, minced garlic, tarragon or parsley, and one egg. The last of which is one boiled egg - the yolk crumbled in, the egg white diced for textural contrast. The thick, complex sauce is its own entity rather than a garnish. In fact I could forgo the sandwich altogether and simply eat the tongue with the sauce, which is, of course, what I did with my leftover slabs of tongue.

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

These are pig ears, simmered and sliced thinly, in fish sauce and lime. There's a bit of Thai basil, some cilantro, and shredded cabbage in there too.

Usually at Thai places you'll see larb, a ground meat salad of sorts, with ground pork or beef, though larb can be comprised of any number of animal parts. I got the idea for this dish from Zabb Elee, an Isan Thai restaurant here in New York. The exact dish on the menu was "ground pork, pig ear and liver larb," and darn if I didn't fight my friend for the slices of tender pork liver and the slivers of gelatinous ears.

I really enjoy the larb with pig's ears. The pig skin soaks up the marinade, and then you get the crunch of the cartilage with every bite. Since I'm usually deep-frying my pig's ears as a topping for salad, it's nice to use the ears as the main ingredient in the salad itself.

Still the dish could just as well become tripe larb, or trotter larb, or any combination thereof using ears, liver, tripe and more. And if you think about the range of livers (chicken, duck, pork, or beef) you can use to make larb, the options are manifold.

Actually I think any animal parts tossed in fish sauce and lime, with fresh herbs and vegetables, will be something you will want to eat again and again. Whenever I make some animal part, I set aside a little to larb-ify. I have not been met with a part yet I didn't like larbified.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

I used to think that the best usage for beef tongue in Mexican cuisine was tacos de lengua, but that just goes to show you how little I know about tongues. Turns out I like tongue cemitas just as much as tongue tacos, if not more.

A cemita is a class of Mexican sandwich with meat, avocado, white cheese, onions and some sort of red sauce, usually on a sesame seed roll. Regional variations abound.

Now of course my favorite versions of cemitas have either headcheese, tongue, or fatty chorizo. Especially tongue. Put chunks of crispy browned tongue in between those slabs of avocado and cheese, and I don't know if there's a better bite of food out there.

There could be as-good, or maybe incomparably good bites of food, the latter if you tried to compare, for instance, ice cream with tongue cemita. That is what my one of my old philosophy professors would have called, beyond stupid, you neophyte, you ingrate. I thought I'd be low-maintenance about what went into a tongue cemita. But it turns out that I have some pretty finicky preferences when it comes to how to put together the perfect cemita lengua.

This is how brown you want your tongue to be.

First, the surface of the tongue has to be dark brown and crispy. That's a no-brainer. More textural contrast equals good. I've had tongue cemitas for which the cubes just sort of sit there, growing ever softer from the internal heat of the sandwich, so by the time you are halfway through, both tongue and bread are unpleasantly soggy.

Second, I don't like too many herbaceous frills or extraneous sauces. Some cemitas I've eaten at Mexican places come with hoja santa, an herb that has a licorice-like flavor, and some come with a lot of spicy and sweet red sauce. I like neither, really, on my cemita lengua. I think it detracts from the tongue, which is so good that it doesn't need too much embellishment.

What it could use, however, is a little help in the texture department.

For creaminess, I like slices of avocado and black beans, which can be mashed, if you like. (Robyn has written about this cemita lengua in Brooklyn, which does a black bean mash that's really good.)

For richness and a bit of tang, lots of crema. I never skimp on the crema. You're already eating a rich and fatty organ, so go all out here.

Besides that, the usual suspects go in: cheese, shredded iceberg, and slices of tomato. I'd squeeze a little lime over the whole thing, if I had it my way.

Of course these are just my cemita preferences, and my cemita preferences alone. Trying to argue that my preferences are objectively true would be, as one of my old philosophy professors would say, "A problem of moral cognitivism." (Ha! Gotcha!)

The only part of a tongue cemita for which I am open to compromise is, ironically, the cemita part. If you happen not to live in an area with a panaderia, or some kind of access to Mexican breads, you can substitute a sesame roll or a hero roll that has an equally dry-crisp crust, and a somewhat fluffy interior. It's maddening, I know. But I just like my cemita the way I like it.

[Photographs: Chichi Wang]

I bet you thought you'd never utter oxtail and marmalade in the same breath. Probably, if you don't like your meat to be sweet, then you won't be running out to buy the ingredients for oxtail marmalade anytime soon. It's not as extreme as it sounds—you are not combining oxtail with a jar of fruit jam, or anything silly like that.

But it is a sweet dish, sweetened with brown sugar and rich with red wine and red wine vinegar. There is something distinctly jam-like, I'll admit, about spreading the oxtail on toast.

It's not for everyone. But if you are a sucker for sweetish meat, like red-braised pork, and sweet and sour pork, then you will like this dish.

I'll tell you about the afternoon I made these. I began after lunchtime and did not finish until dinnertime. I did not dawdle, either. It just took that long.

First there were these: sections of oxtail. Selfishly, I tried to convince my butcher to sell me only the big, meaty pieces, but then he said, "What would I do with the end of the tail?" Quite right, quite right.

Then there was this: a big pile of oxtail meat, deboned after hours of simmering in red wine and stock.

Then came the perfect mid-afternoon snack. I made sure there was no one around, and then I set myself down at the table with a plate of the bones, sprinkled with salt and pepper, and gnawed to my heart's content. By the end, my fingers were sticky in gelatinous tendons and meat. These are the sort of little snacks that cooks live for (at least this cook does).

Finally, the end result: You marry the cooked oxtail with the marmalade part, which is shallots and carrots cooked in butter, then cooked down in red wine, vinegar, and sugar. By the end, the little cubes of carrots taste like candy. In sum, oxtail + sweet/tart vegetables = oxtail marmalade.

From start to finish, it had taken more than six hours, and by the end my kitchen was as hot as a sauna. I had used two bottles of red wine, along with gobs of butter and sugar.

The version from Blue Ribbon in New York is even more indulgent. The recipe calls for two bottles of port in addition to two bottles of red wine, and veal stock, too. But being a thrifty home cook, I tried to see if the recipe could be pared down (i.e., no port, and no veal stock), and the answer is resoundingly, yes. But feel free to throw tons more money into the pot, if you like.

I must confess that on the day I finished the recipe, I was not in the mood at all for oxtail marmalade. (That is almost always the case, I feel, with involved recipes. By the end you have already been smelling and sampling the same thing for hours and hours, and you're probably exhausted too.)

Worse still, I had a taste of the oxtail marmalade and found it too sweet. I thought to myself, great, I just poured two bottles of red wine and my blood, sweat, and tears, into making too-sweet meat, and now I just want a bowl of cereal before I go to bed. So that is what I did.

But the next day, the sweetness had mellowed, giving way to the deep red-wine flavor. Little cubes of carrots glistened, like jewels, in the dark mass of oxtail. It was good—better than good.

The character, the essential nature of oxtail meat, seemed preserved and intensified by the wine and sweet vegetables.

It was everything I had dreamed oxtail marmalade could be, and more.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photographs: Chichi Want]

This is bone marrow, cut the long way so the marrow lays fully exposed. I prefer my bones to be cut this way to allow full access to the interior. And once the roasted marrow is all gone, you can go back into the bone with a piece of crusty bread and soak up all the residual browned bits of marrow and fat.

For roasted bone marrow, you can either tame it or go along with it, and nothing in between. Bone marrow is such a stand-out ingredient. You can't just throw it on a plate, and pretend like it's any old cut. Either contrast it with acidic and refreshing flavors or accent its fattiness with something even richer. Of course, you can even mix and match the rich/acidic elements. Just don't let it get too fussy.

Here are six tips for how to eat roasted bone marrow:

Shallot and currant confit.

1. Coat in flour or breadcrumbs. This is not so much a flavor pairing as a note on preparation. Coated, the marrow's surface will be crispy and golden, a meaty crème brulee of sorts.
2. Pair it with a small, sharp, salad. Probably the most well-known accompaniment is parsley salad, popularized by chef Fergus Henderson. Parsley tossed in olive oil and lemon, with capers thrown into the mix has everything you need if your aim is to contrast the marrow - the acidity of the lemon and capers, the herbaceousness of the parsley, all undercut its richness. Use other bitter or assertive greens besides parsley such as watercress and arugula, and pair with thinly sliced radishes.
3. Onion, shallot or garlic confit. Or onion, shallot, or garlic marmalade. A jam-like aromatic is great to have on hand for a number of things, not just marrow.
4. Flavored butter. Butter the marrow before roasting. Herb butter is nice, but I love roasted marrow paired with anchovy butter. Or, coat with flour and drizzle with the butter for a crispy coating that holds in marrow's natural richness.
5. Glazing. Glaze the marrow before roasting. I like a glaze of miso, mirin and soy sauce on my tofu, and I like it almost as much on my marrow.
6. Blue cheese. At first I was skeptical, but a friend suggested that I try the marrow smothered and roasted with blue cheese. Paired with shallot confit, the blue cheese and marrow on toast was rich and satisfying.

Or, just roast the darn bones and spread the fatty goodness on toast. But I would not say no to any of these ways to gussy up marrow.

About the author: Born in Shanghai and raised in New Mexico, Chichi Wang currently resides in Manhattan, where she divides her time between writing, cooking, and tracking down the best noodles in the city. Visit her blog, Mostly Tripe.

[Photographs: Robyn Lee, unless otherwise noted]

Last Sunday I was served a really wonderful roast chicken dinner at a dear friend's house, and I secretly grew annoyed. I wanted the whole chicken to myself. And I thought, well, if I can't have a whole chicken right now, I will go buy half a dozen quails and have each one by myself, so that by the end I will have consumed six whole little birds, without having to share with anyone.

There. Isn't that an awful confession? But it's true.

Actually I shouldn't be complaining at all. In fact it was a thrilling moment when my friend pulled the chicken, which she had purchased at the Greenmarket, out of the oven. To my delight, tucked next to some roasted potatoes and carrots were two chicken feet, looking very plump and tasty. I planned on claiming and eating those feet.

And I did. No one else wanted the feet! Quite conveniently, the breast meat people didn't even want to play rock-paper-scissors for the dark meat. As usual, I waited a respectable period of time, then mined the chicken for those two little pockets of blood congealed near the rib cage. So things could really not have been any better, unless you count the minor tragedy of another friend claiming the chicken neck before me. But even if I'd gotten the chicken neck, I would have have felt the same urge to sit down at the table with a whole bird to myself.

That's when I decided to buy six little quails all for myself. They taste sort of like tiny ducks, since their breast meat is dark rather than white. I cooked the six quails in different ways, on different days, and dined alone. It was so therapeutic.

On the first day I roasted a single quail. On the second day, I simmered another two. On the third day, I battered and deep-fried two more, and on the last day, I stewed the sixth quail in soup.

[Photograph: Chichi Wang]

Of those preparations, the simmered version was my favorite, and I'll tell you why. Roasted quail is neither as tender as chicken nor as fatty as duck. Deep-fried quail is pretty good, like deep-fried anything, but it just made me wish I was eating fried chicken. Quail is too small and bony for soup.

But simmering the quail quickly on the stove is the best way to savor its quail-ness. I browned the quails in butter, then tossed in some chopped capers and mustard. They took about 15 minutes to simmer in stock, the sauce reducing into a glaze of butter and capers with a mustard-y kick.

I felt so reinvigorated from my six whole little birds that when I went to another friend's house the next week, and was served another whole chicken, I was OK with sharing. Except this time I went straight for the neck.