Another vegetarian alert... this is hard-core.

I think there will come a point in my culinary career when I will have to give up meat… that’s how I felt with the pigeons at Les Trois Forts and how I felt at my present job when we made pig feet terrine and veal’s head. To be completely honest I have enjoyed pig trotters in the past (hey, I’m Filipino after all), but this experience was completely disgusting. The chef gave me a dish full of boiled trotters and asked me to tear them apart and throw away the bones but keep everything including the jelly and juices and all that… so like the pigeons, I took this as a challenge, of course I could do it! Let me tell you that pigs feet are more like human hands than I thought. They were literally like soft and pudgy hands. I did my best to stop thinking of them as what they felt like and just tried to complete the task at hand (no pun intended). I remembered what my first sous-chef would say (“You are a robot!”) and tore through the flesh, the smell of death rising up my nostrils. If I remember my biology classes correctly, hands (and feet) are the parts of the body with the most bones. I can confirm this! The freakiest part was a row of bones smack in the middle of the hand, er… trotter, that resemble a row of perfectly aligned teeth. So as I tore into each hand… a row of teeth appeared. I wanted to take a photo because it was the weirdest thing ever but I couldn’t be bothered to remove my gloves to take the photo, but most of all I didn’t want the chef catching me doing that… in retrospect I really should have. All I have is a photo of the untorn trotters.

A few days later when the chef asked me to try the terrine I did… it was really gross and I didn’t finish it.
As for the veal head, I had no idea what that was, but when he reached for an actual whole head wrapped in a net and plastic with the eyes shut, that was really too much for me to bear. I couldn’t even take a picture , it was so horrific. Thank God he cooked it while I was absent… but when he sliced the head to serve it to his clients, I really thought I was going to hurl.