Hoof & Mouth

Friiiiday! I have watched a lot of Olympics this week and have just declared the skier from Norway as my new boyfriend. Mrs. Tracye Aksel Svindal. I'm liking it. I am going to doodle our names in a heart on my Trapper Keeper notebook.

My real boyfriend and I have deemed ice dancing as somewhat boring. Maybe all those seasons of Dancing With the Stars has taken the edge of excitement off this event for us. When I was a yute it was one of my favorite parts of Winter Olympics. Now, a little drab.

So now I will confess a secret about my Yute + Winter Olympics. It's really quite shameful, and I just want to say that it's not all my fault, I was YOUNG and didn't really KNOW BETTER. Okaaaay.....here.....GOES:

One of my favorite memories of watching the Winter Olympics involved my mother and bowls of hot-off-the stove pigs feet. Yup. You read that correctly. I grew up eating pigs feet. And I LOVED them. I looked forward to weekends with a bowl of pigs feet and the Olympics. We'd eat 'em other times, too, but always on a weekend in the wintertime. But especially during the Olympics.

My mom would cook up a big batch of 'em. I remember she would take the little feet and hold them over the gas flame on the stove to burn off the little hairs. No one wants to eat hairy pigs feet, afterall. And then, when the feet were all clean, in a pot they'd go, filled with water and a good spill of vinegar. Then they'd cook, for a loooog time, with my mom periodically skimming the foam that would form off the top.

We (my mother and myself) could hardly wait for them to be done. Once they were cooked tender, in a bowl they'd go, three or four feet to a bowl. Then, the water/vinegar mixture was poured into the bowl of feet and they'd be plopped into the refrigerator to get nice and cold. The water/vinegar would congeal into a blubbery substance, and you'd dig in and pull out a foot, listening to the little suction noise the foot made as it pulled away from the congeal. A good pour of salt on the foot and by God, it was Weekend Winter Olympics heaven.

Okay, I'll pause while you go throw up a little.

Better? Good. Sorry about that.

I knew I'd found my Match Made In Pigs Feet Heaven when I spilled this shameful secret to Kenny and he told me that he, too, gnawed pigs feet during his yute. God Bless the Melting Pot of Ethnicity that is Ohio.