| Seece said: stuffed pigs' trotters Serves 4 4 pigs' back trotters Preheat the oven to 160ºC/gas 3. Place the trotters in a casserole with the diced carrots and onions, the wine, port and veal stock. Cover and braise in the oven for 3 hours. Meanwhile, fry the sweetbreads in the butter for 5 minutes, add the morels and chopped onion and cook for another 5 minutes. Leave to cool. Purée the chicken breast with the egg white and cream, and season with salt and pepper. Mix with the sweetbread mixture to make the stuffing. Take the trotters out of the casserole and strain the cooking stock, keeping the stock but discarding the vegetables. Open the trotters out flat and lay each one on a piece of foil. Leave to cool. Fill the cooled trotters with the chicken stuffing and roll tightly in foil. Chill in the fridge for at least 2 hours. Preheat the oven to 220ºC/gas 7 or prepare a steamer, and when the water is simmering, steam the foil-wrapped trotters until heated through. Alternatively, put the trotters in a casserole, cover and heat in the oven for 15 minutes. Put the trotters on a serving dish and remove the foil. Pour the reserved stock into the casserole and reduce by half. Whisk in a knob of butter, pour the sauce over the trotters and serve very hot. |
Looks good from ingredients and recipe.
I like very much sweetbreads (BTW, besides having a better taste and consistency than brains, they contain a lot less cholesterol). A simple recipe for them is breaded and deep fried. (In Italy they are often served together with a wide range of breaded or in batter fried foods, from vegetables and mushrooms, to various meats, stoned olives stuffed with a meat filling and breaded, to fruits, and even thick custard cooled until solidified, cut in lozenges, breaded and fried and also vanilla and chocolate custard puffs dipped in batter and fried them too).
Pig trotters are also very good baked together with beans, the tastiest recipe for them, IMVHO, is the French "cassoulet", that includes also duck or goose and their fat, while the simpler Italian recipes are maybe healthier, as they use olive oil and sometimes just a little lard instead of mainly animal fat like the French.
Another fast note: the most common herbs added to water to boil legumes in central Italy are onion, celery, carrot and sage for white beans and onion, celery, carrot and rosemary for chickpeas. Pepper or chili pepper optional. These simplest recipes can be eaten as they are, very simple, hot with their broth, as a soup, often just adding pasta and cooking it in the already cooked legumes, or cooled, drained and seasoned as a salad, often with raw sweet red onion sliced, but they are also the base for more complex recipes. Old recipes often include lard or cured bacon or cheek. Olive oil is often added just before serving, not during boiling. A simple and tasty recipe using one of these bases is beans and pig skins soup (using skins from cured pig, scraped from possible dust and dirt and scalded to soften it and remove excess of salt, makes them tastier than using fresh skins), it tastes quite like beans and pig trotters. In Italian regions where pig is traditionally eaten more often, like Umbria, it's also possible to find cured pig ears, they're excellent too with beans.
Oh, crap, I had lunch two hours ago and I'd already start eating again! 
