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ICK01-at244by-Anna Sattler on Flickr
Stop making that face. Do you want your face to freeze like that?
No, I’m not talking to you, I’m quoting my mother’s response to my face every time she said liver was planned for dinner. Mom* made liver no one could love. First she fried the onions. Then the liver hit the pan and didn’t come out until it was black through and through, curled up like a dessicated jellyfish and about as tasty as shoe leather. Just the smell of it cooking was enough to send us on bended knee to beg Daddy for a special trip to McDonalds.
Now, you gotta give me credit: I’ve made and enjoyed raw meat, beet kvass, beef tongue, all manner of sprouted, soaked, fermented things with odd rubbery-mushroomy-scobys floating on top. I’ve even made pate with chicken liver that was scrumptious. But evil, maroon, stomach-churning beef liver? EEK!
But, still it’s a powerhouse of a food. Few food sources can compete with liver in the nutrient density arena. If I could only find a way to cook it…
When Kimberly of Hartkeisonline came for dinner, she told me about her mom’s liver recipe. It went something like this:
Fry up a package of bacon, remove from pan. Fry a sliced onion or two in the bacon grease, add chicken livers that have first been dredged in flour with salt and pepper added. Fry until brown and crispy on the outside, still pink on the inside. Remove liver and onions from pan. Add slices of fried pineapple to the pan and fry both sides until browned. Serve fried pineapple with the liver and onions and squeeze fresh lemon juice on top of the liver.
The idea of pineapple with liver intrigued me. I mean, sure, liver and onions is classic. And there are few in our family who can contain themselves when bacon is frying. But sweet and tart pineapple (with all that great bromelain for digestion) alongside? I made a few little adjustments to the recipe and came up with Our Liver Experiment:
3 slices grassfed beef liver
4 organic lemons
1 pound uncured pastured bacon
1 whole organic pineapple
2 organic sweet onions, sliced into rings
3 tablespoons sprouted wheat flour
Juice three and a half of the lemons and pour over the liver slices in a shallow dish. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Turn partway through the marinating process if the liquid doesn’t cover the slices.
Slice the bacon into 1-inch wide pieces and fry until crisp. Remove from the pan and pour off (and reserve) most of the fat.
Slice the pineapple into half-inch thick rings, 
removing rind and core, 
and saute in bacon fat in the same pan over medium heat until just browned on both sides. 
Remove from pan.
Add back half of the reserved bacon fat and toss in the onion rings. 
Saute the onions until just browned and remove from pan.
Dry off the liver slices and dredge them in the sprouted wheat flour. 
Add all the remaining bacon fat and cook the liver just until browned on both sides. Plate the liver, topped with onion, pineapple and bacon. Pass with big smiles, the remaining lemon half for squeezing a tad of juice over and “YUM!” noises.
How did we like it? Well those of us who love liver (me) thought it was fantastic and had two pieces! Those of us who enjoy strongly flavored foods (Rose) said it was not bad at all! Those of us whose palates are less refined (Blair, Kate and Christy) ate three bites each, the required minimum, and begged off gracefully. The boys? Hubby was out of town and John was at work. Little do they know I saved them some…
*Not MY mother. MY mother is a gourmet cook and would NEVER overcook liver.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted this week by Kelly the Kitchen Kop
O God, sir, here’s a dish I love not. I cannot endure my lady Tongue.
Clearly, Benedick from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is referring to the acerbic wit of Beatrice and not the tender delicacy we ate tonight! We’ve been branching out a bit in recent days, and tonight’s experiment was beef tongue.
Okay, it was a little unnerving to pick up the tongue from its package and see how much it looked like…a tongue! Tastebuds and all. I called Rose, my little scientist, to come examine it with me. She was enthralled!
I cooked it slowly for about two and a half hours with onion, celery and carrot. The skin turned a very unappealing gray, but peeled off easily. Under the skin was meat that separated into strings, rather like a skirt steak that’s been pulled apart with a fork. I took this meat and diced it and put it in a skillet with a cup of water, a half cup of apple cider vinegar and a teaspoon of Rapadura. The liquid boiled off and left the meat so incredibly delicious. Biting into the meat was like biting into a forty-dollar filet. I served it over noodles and the sweet/sour of the meat was a wonderful foil to the bitterness of Brussels sprouts cooked with cream and shallots.
And lest you think I’ve lost my mind, tongue is a fatty part of the meat, and a traditional food. Tongue sandwiches were popular during the Great Depression, when muscle meats were hard to come by and expensive. I paid about $8 for a grassfed beef tongue that weighed in at just less than two pounds.
I had to add some other meat to stretch the meal in the photo for guests, so you’ll see in the photo two distinct types of meat. The tongue meat is the lighter brown with fewer “lines.” By the way, for those of you who cook for the very young, very old or otherwise dentally challenged, tongue meat is very easily chewed.
So, try some tongue, as Psychic Lunch said in a recent Twitter post, “It’s the meat that licks you back!”
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.
