The Tripe-l Threat

Tripe is a little scary-sounding, innit? Tripe is basically cow guts, in case you are not a tripe aficionado. I certainly wouldn't call myself an aficionado, but I am an adventurous eater. I cannot say I have the desire to try every dish under the sun, but I do have the desire to try a lot of them.

And there I was, in a homespun Italian eatery when "Trippa Parmiagano" caught my eye. My thought process immediately went something like this: "No way. NOT eating tripe. What else is on this menu?" I scanned the whole menu again, but it was a pretty typical Italian menu and having worked for 3 years in a similarly-themed restaurant, there was almost nothing on that menu I hadn't already eaten a lifetime supply of, nothing new that piqued my interest. Except tripe.

Tripe was on plenty of Mexican menus in Chicago when I lived there and subsisted on cheap burritos...but I was a vegetarian in those days and tripe hardly earned a second glance from me while I was searching for spicy carrots and "torta aguacate". So tripe never passed these lips. And so I ordered it this time. I won't bore you with a play-by-play description of the total dining experience. Suffice it to say, it posessed far less of the gross-out factor than the squeamish would imagine and far less of the blow-your-mind factor that the gourmands would imagine. It was OK...kind of like an earthy calimari.

But since my dining companion and I were both highly interested in tripe's nutritional profile, we looked up the information. Now here is where tripe becomes really compelling. A serving of tripe has a mere 111 calories and a whopping 17 grams of protein, but with negligible fat and carbohydrate content. Tripe is a pure power food! Truly, that is a lot of quality protein without much else to dilute it. "All killer, no filler", as the rock and roll crowd might say. If you are working on the body beautiful, tripe seems like a great choice, nutritionally speaking.  Plus, it has become rather important to consider matters like sustainability and the reduction of waste, so using the unpopular pieces/parts of the cow you are eating seems like the only right and responsible thing to do.

But, as I mentioned earlier, in terms of taste and texture, I found tripe to be merely OK. And I suspect that just "OK" will not really be enough for me over the long haul. So I need to figure out how to make tripe delicious...worthy of a craving.

This time, I am not going to talk to anyone who knows tripe. Nor am I going to look up a single recipe. I am going to see what, if anything, I can do on my own.  Kind of like a personal pet-project. Of course, I plan on starting this adventure in the warm-weather months, when every window can be flung open for the ventilation of my mistakes.  And don't you dare tell mi esposo.

I promise to keep you posted. But if you stop by for dinner and my egg noodles seem a little tough...well, you may have been secretly graced with some enhanced protein content in your entree. And of course you can thank me later!