Chicken Livers

Remember my tirade/speech/spiel about the value of adventurous cooking?  How one must use new ingredients and not get in a rut?  How one must expand one's cuisine with new flavors and ideas?  Yeah, well, I'm dangerously close to Completely Abandoning and Never Using Questionable Ingredients for Questionable Dishes again.  The incomprehensible fact is that recipes exist that are not just bad, as in, bad proportions or bad instructions or whatever, but awful in their very conception.  These recipes may appear on reputable websites with food critics waxing eloquent.  And they will disappoint you bitterly.

Enter Chicken Liver Pate, stage right.

Okay, so I should have known: chicken livers don't exactly say "snacktime!"  It's a great delicacy in [insert remote land here...]  But I've had chicken livers before, in fact I think they are pretty good when covered in flour and deep-fried in fat.  And I believed the author of this recipe when they said this dish was delicious.  I couldn't wait to transform a lowly ingredient into a surprisingly good concoction.

Oh, the optimism before my fall!

So I've eaten chicken livers but never cooked them, so I was a bit apprehensive when I opened the package from Martins.  I should have known what to expect--livers clean the blood, so it would stand to reason that they would be full of and floating in blood.  Okay, so that was a bit gross.  I cleaned them and cooked them as instructed (only slightly nauseated and beginning to wonder).  I strained more blood (now cooked) out of the broth I cooked them in and transferred them to my blender.  (actually my food processor and I had a disagreement about where this dish was meant to end up.  I said inside the food processor.   But it had other ideas....)





First of all, I am quite sure that the consistency was off.  But before I tried to fix that, I dipped in a finger to taste the TRANSFORMATION FROM NASTY TO DELICIOUS. . .  Aaaaand almost lost my lunch.  Just the memory of that taste/smell/texture makes me feel sick.  So then I had a kitchen that smelled nasty, looked nasty, and was covered in ground-up chicken livers.  All I can say is the first cut is the deepest.

Meanwhile, on another burner, red sauce was bubbling away happily, so innocent and so vegetarian.

Thus ends my Adventures in Experimental Cooking...