I put three (actual) feet in a footlong

Subway, feet fresh

Dear clowns,

How’s it going? Everybody doing okay?

This week’s newsletter is all about one specific part of the body, and that’s feet. I can feel a small subsection of you guys getting irrationally excited by that sentence, and all I can say is that I am here for you.

When it comes to eating an animal, enjoying it from ass-to-mouth is one of the most respectful things you can do. This is very important, especially when you are talking to any famous chef, who will probably call it “nose-to-tail” dining. This is the concept where you use every bit of the animal to respect its former life and to minimize waste.

But one of the things people don’t generally talk about, is eating its feet. The foot of an animal usually doesn’t yield a ton of meat, considering it’s mostly tough connective tissue and muscle. Where there’s a lack of physical substance, however, there’s a ton of flavor.

I decided to take one of the most flavorful parts of the animal, the foot (or in this case, three types of animal feet), and use it to improve one of the least flavorful things in the world, which is a Subway footlong.

I purchased three types of animal feet from a massive Chinese grocery store here in Chicago, called 88 Marketplace.

If you’re anywhere within the Chicagoland area, you have got to make a trip. 88 Marketplace is an absolute marvel. It has an enormous butcher counter, a live seafood section, and an entire food court housed inside. I grabbed beef feet, a pig’s trotter, and as the label called them, “chicken paws.”

I wasn’t kidding about the chicken paw thing.

As I mentioned before, animal feet tend to have a lot of connective tissue and some really tough muscle.

That means they aren’t exactly going to yield a lot of actual food. But they will leave you with a ton of delicious meaty flavor, which most people use to make some form of soup. Unfortunately, connective tissue takes a lot of time to cook and break down into silky gelatin, so you’re looking at hours simmering on a stovetop. Unless, however, you use a pressure cooker, which will save you a shitload of time.

So I whipped out my Instant Pot, which I most recently used to cook an egg for three hours.

I put all three types of feet in the Instant Pot, salted it well, and then poured some chicken broth into it.

Honestly, I still don’t have a basic understanding of how to use a pressure cooker. I talk this big game about gelatin, connective tissue, and ass-to-mouth dining, but be assured that I have no idea what I’m doing. I just know that the high pressure in a pressure cooker cooks stuff, like…faster. Whenever I’ve needed to save time on dinner, I’ve always consulted an ad-riddled recipe blog, none of which have steered me wrong yet.

So with most cooking I’m able to sort of eyeball how stuff will turn out, but with my pressure cooker, all I’m ever doing is guessing. Sure, I could learn, but what fun is that?

Besides, if I wreck dinner, I just have an excuse to get Taco Bell.

That’s why I set the Instant Pot for one full hour.

When in doubt, just set your pressure cooker for an hour, because that’s a nice round number. This has been Cooking With Dannis.

After the Instant Pot finished cooking and depressurizing, I was left with what appeared to be a scene from a horror movie.

Check out all those talons and shit. The best part was that it smelled absolutely delicious.

I took everything out of the pot and surveyed it on my cutting board.

Everything was falling apart to the touch. The pig’s foot turned into gelatinous ribbons of meat and skin, the tendons on the beef feet had pulled away from the bone, and the chicken feet (paws) became all gnarled up and discolored.

I took a forkful of meat off the pig’s foot and went to town.

It was absolutely delicious. The meat was rich and soft, with a ton of concentrated flavor.

Check out this chicken foot.

This is what my hands look like during winter.

I pulled as much of the meat off of the bones as I could, which wasn’t much.

The pig’s foot was easy enough to pick apart. But the beef feet left me with a fair amount of elastic tendon that needed to be sliced off, while the chicken feet just left me with mostly bone, cartilage, and some soft mushy skin. We have nothing but good times in this household.

I figured I’d keep the three-foot salad pretty simple by just adding mayo and a bit of chopped red onions to the mixture.

Mmm…foot salad.

I went to our local Subway and ordered a Veggie Delite, which is just some bread with whatever veggies you want shoved angrily in it.

When I was a kid, getting Subway was a real treat, because pointing at whichever toppings I wanted on my sandwich made me feel sort of like a grownup. The person behind the glass had to put whatever you wanted on your sandwich, no matter how nasty your request might have been. Eight sauces on your meatball sub? No problem. You want a pound of onions on that thing? All yours. Because that’s what grown ups like to do, point at shit and make someone else give them what they want.

I decided on a whim to see if my footlong from Subway was indeed, a foot long, because I like to measure all of my food to see if it’s a good deal.

Honestly, the sub was pretty close, give or take half an inch. Remember when some assclown sued Subway because they complained the sandwiches weren’t exactly a foot long? The American legal system is pure magic. So’s Subway.

I spooned the foot salad, which was starting to seriously harden, into the Subway footlong.

That’s three feet in one, baby!

You may be asking yourselves, “Who the fuck holds a sandwich that way?”

Someone who writes this newsletter, that’s who. I took a big fat bite. As fantastic as the foot meat was while it was piping hot, the gelatin was starting to seriously set now that the meat had cooled off. That meant I was basically chewing on rubber while simultaneously eating Subway, which felt like its own insult. I mean, it all tasted pretty good, but that was a serious jaw work out.

Okay, let’s just say I wouldn’t invite you over for this one. Although I suppose that if I’m inviting you over to eat Subway sandwiches, that probably means I don’t like you very much. Now I’m left with this weird three-foot salad in my fridge and I’m trying to figure out what to do with it.

Oh, I know.

Want anything from Taco Bell?

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Later this week? Dick tacos. It’s exactly what you think it’s gonna be.

Hang in there, everyone. As usual, I love all of you very much, and I’ll hop into some of your inboxes later this week. Don’t forget to subscribe.