3 posts tagged “liver”
Now I've gone back to work, I'm finding it diffcult to guarantee enough energy to cook properly in the evenings. Plus it's COLD, and we want the sort of food that takes ages and ages. And we're poor. So I've been cooking several stews or similar over the weekend, that can just be finished off and reheated. Today I've made:
- red cabbage in red wine, with onions, bacon, goose dripping, thyme, bay and lots of pepper - to be finished with vacuum packed chestnuts and to eat with gammon steaks and baked potato if we're really hungry
- beef braised with fresh ginger, star anise, slices of mandarin orange, lots of carrots, beef stock and sake
I've got something with celeriac and blue cheese in the pipeline, but that will have to be last minute. There's a curry sauce and veg waiting to be stir-fried with some chicken. Which makes four huge meals and puts me ahead of the game. In the past few weeks we've had:
- goose legs cooked in fat with garlic and thyme in the slow-cooker, fished out and flashroasted
- venison liver braised with bacon and lots of red onion in stock and redcurrant jelly
- soft tortillas stuffed with beans, or veg, or chilli, coated with spicy tomato sauce, topped with cheese and baked
- giant suet herb dumplings cooked in thin veg soup
The larger Christmas meats are beginning to show up now, especially in freezers, and I'm thinking about how to do those and then portion them up.
I had always thought of heart as a long-cooking casserole meat (although I've had cold smoked moose heart, which was gorgeous), but apparently lamb heart and liver make a good mix and can go on a bbq kebab or be grilled briefly. Lots of yummy Moroccan flavours.
You can hollow out a giant potato, bury a well-seasoned lamb kidney in it, and bake it. We're trying that one this week.
Kidney can feature in Chinese dishes, stir-fried and with a sweet and sour sauce. Liver salad with a Chinese sesame and garlic dressing.
There was also a recipe for Little Pots of Curried Kidneys which is basically a very mild extra-creamy curry sauce, with kidneys and onions fried in butter mixed in, topped with breadcrumbs and briefly flash-baked. Looks like a good breakfast, or starter, or lunch with kedgeree.
A Spanish recipe for pig's trotters simmered with onion, tomato, garlic, with added prunes and pine nuts, thickened with ground almonds and crushed biscuit. That would do for a belly pork or lamb breast as well, I would think.
It was an interesting book to read, difficult because there is a lot of text on darkly coloured pages. I wasn't sure whether the aim of it was to enthuse me or gross me out (tripe makes me heave at the best of times, but fish tripe?), but it's certainly given me a few ideas. I certainly wouldn't buy my own copy, though.
The Cuisine for December 1984 also had a retro-article on goose cookery, it's not worth writing out the recipes, they were fairly standard, but some of the ideas were a little bit different. And would do fine for duck too.
Liver - dredge with seasoned flour and cook in goose fat on a high heat, serving with a jammy sauce made with prunes soaked in Madeira, onions and tart apples, with a little marjoram at the end.
Casserole - with onions and mushrooms, finished off with double cream, french mustard and fresh parsley
Ragout with bacon, turnips, cloves, bay leaf - caramelising the turnips in goose fat and sugar before adding them
A very complex stuffing for goose, making a cornbread with crumbled Italian sausage in it, mixing that with dried orchard fruits and mushrooms. Served with chestnuts braised with celery and goose gravy until coated and caramelised, and honeyed yams. I wouldn't do all three of those, it would be far too sweet - and certainly I'd want a watercress salad on the side, or a raw cranberry relish, or something very tart and sharp.
