Chicken Feet Good Enough to Eat

The Chicken Foot Fascination continues. Here in KC the Bo Ling group of restaurants serves Dim Sum on the weekends. It's one of my long time favorite events to either take out of town visitors or carry out to enjoy at home. So some of the dishes at the Top Chef Dim Sum challenge were very familiar to those of us here at the Kitchen. I decided it was time to reacquaint myself Chicken Feet in Black Bean Sauce.

Just like the feet of many mammals and birds, the chicken feet have lots of little bones. They are gelatinous with little meat. Bo Ling's version is spicy and fragrant with star anise and black beans. No nails on these feet.

Now after a little research on preparing chicken feet, I'm wondering if Casey was doomed from the beginning. Most of the recipes I've read call for frying and stewing at least for the black bean version but it makes sense with all that hard gelatinous material that introducing a long wet heat makes the feet much easier to eat.

The real question for me is why didn't Casey use a good pair of sharp kitchen shears to whip through all those chicken nails?