Frickin’ Veal
Dear Chef Bourdain;
I’m down to the last half of the recipes in the book. Of course I took a lot of the low-hanging fruit for the first half, guts night notwithstanding. Now I’m trying to find the stuff for some of the harder-to-find ingredients.
Fuck you and your veal, Chef. Seriously, there’s no single ingredient that you use more than veal. You know, people don’t eat a lot of veal these days, have you noticed? Trying to find the more exotic cuts, most butchers are happy to oblige – if I buy a half a metric ton of it. And the dirty looks I get from other people when I ask for veal – you’d think it was THEIR baby I wanted to serve up on a platter. (Which would probably be fine with my wife.)
Frickin’ veal, chef! Why couldn’t you have gone nuts with like..chicken or pork chops or something?
Davy
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Letters to Bourdain
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Letters To Bourdain 
Dear Davy,
I found your letters while looking for someone else’s experiences with the tripes les halles. It is both a relief and completely not a relief to see that it looks to be approximately as much of a bastard as I anticipated. I am perplexed to find that you met Mr Bourdain before finding out about Julie, but then it took a bit of digging before finding myself here.. Are there others documenting in this vein?
40+ recipes since november? You Sir, are a hard-out!
Two different bourguignon recipes in one night? I take my hat off.. You rule! And I, merely a hobbyist with no leg to stand on ..legless anyway from all that leftover wine, Champagne, port…
You can be sure that I have aggregated your RSS feed and am following with great interest.
Yours sincerely
Tom
Hey Tom!
Well, don’t let the difficulty of the Tripes Les Halles dissuade you – it’s well worth it. My friends are still bragging to their friends about the brave few who actually tried it. Now when I turn up anywhere with some food, they all want to know if it’s something disgusting from Tony Bourdain. (It rarely is. But not never!) One recommendation a friend made was to do the first two stages of boiling tripe on a burner outdoors. Wish I’d thought of that – I recommend you do so yourself!
I’m exactly halfway through the book right now, but I’ve only got four months to finish, so I’m going to have to step up my game if I’m going to do them all. Apparently there are a few other folks out there also “cooking the book” for Les Halles Cookbook, though I think I’ve made the most progress. Maybe not. However, it turns out cooking everything in some chef’s book is now a thing, and if you poke around you’ll find ’em for just about everyone.
Davy
Hey Tom,
Nice to see I wasn’t the only one who rolled in here looking for some tips on the tripe.
Davy, I feel your pain with the veal. I’ve had similar problems, that’s why I had to put the tripe on hold for a while. As to the veal, I’ve gotten similar dirty looks when I ask about it- what ever you do, don’t ask the old hippy organic rancher if he has veal. That did not go down well at all. Probably should have seen it coming. You’ve certainly made more progress through the book than I, though I haven’t set any time to do it in. I’ll let you know is four or five years when I make it through the whole thing. Until then, I’m following your blog pretty closely.
-Carson