Liver Muffins?

My mother’s diet is nearly bereft of organ meat and healthy fat thanks to her doctor who has scared her into believing dietary cholesterol is a big, bad meanie waiting in every bite of butter to stop her heart. It didn’t used to be that way. When I was a teen, we had liver and onions at least once a month, and liverwurst sandwiches once a week. I was never thrilled with the liver and onions, but loved liverwurst with mustard and pickles! My friends thought I was nuts.

I’ve been able to convince Mom of some new facts about organ meats…old facts, really, that the medical mainstream has ignored. But she still has an obstacle: a roommate who only eats a handful of food items and is unwilling to expand her horizons beyond them. My Christmas gift to mom this year was a year’s worth of liver pâté in single-servings to stock her freezer. Her roommate doesn’t have to smell the liver cooking, and Mom doesn’t have to go without. I started with a super recipe from Nourished Kitchen, but changed it up a little based on what was available.

Liver Pâté for One

1 lb Livers from Pasture-fed Turkeys
1 Quart Cultured Buttermilk
14 oz Ghee from Grass-fed Cows
2 Large Shallots
2 Tablespoons Fresh Thyme
½ Cup Sherry

Rinse livers gently, pat dry and put in a bowl with buttermilk. Allow livers to soak in buttermilk at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. Drain livers and rinse again.

Heat 4 oz. ghee in a skillet until melted. Slice shallots thinly then add to ghee and brown. Pat livers dry then add to the onions and ghee. Simmer gently until cooked through and until the liquid they release has evaporated. Add the thyme and sherry, scraping up any browned bits from the skillet. Allow to cook down until the sound changes from bubbling to sizzling. Let skillet cool to room temperature.

Add liver mixture and 8 oz. of softened ghee to blender or food processor and process until smooth. Melt the remaining 2 oz. of ghee. Put paper cupcake liners into a cupcake pan with 12 holes. Spoon pâté into paper liners and pour melted ghee on top. Allow to set in the fridge for a few hours or overnight, then stack the pate cups, roll the stack in parchment paper and store in an airtight plastic container or bag in the freezer. Let the pâté come to room temperature before enjoying.

This post is part of Fat Tuesday, Real Food Wednesday and Fight Back Friday.

Shopping List by LexnGer, on Flickr

I don’t plan to do this every week, but I wanted to post my menu plans for this week. Sometimes in the middle of winter it can be hard to come up with ideas. I hope there’s inspiration here for someone!

Breakfasts

• Smoked Salmon Omelette with Shallots and Hollandaise sauce
• Porridge (soaked the night before, with a pantry full of choices for toppings: nuts, seeds, dried fruit, a couple chocolate chips, etc.)
• UFOs (also called egg in a hole, depending on your part of the country)
• Scrambled eggs with bacon and toast
• Fried eggs on torn up bread

Lunches

• Bologna sandwiches (my meat farmer makes the yummiest bologna!)
• Chicken breast chunks (marinated overnight in a combination of citrus juices), brushed with butter and baked, with homemade ranch dip
• Crab dip (from Nourishing Traditions) poured over toast
• Pasta with jarred tomatoes, kale and olives
• Quesadillas
• Salmon spread (from Nourishing Traditions) on sourdough crackers

Dinners

• Stir fried bison steak and cabbage on udon noodles, green salad
• Squash and Sun dried tomato soup (from Nourishing Traditions), hamburgers and broccoli
• Carrot salad (from Nourishing Traditions), Roasted chicken, sauteed parsnips
• Dr. Connelly’s soup (from Nourishing Traditions), Seared Pork Tenderloin medallions with apple cider pan sauce, brussels sprouts with cream and bacon
• Baked Salmon with Egg Mustard sauce (from Nourishing Traditions), frozen peas, a salad of sliced oranges and fennel bulb
• Clean-out-the-fridge meal with Sweet potato dollars served with leftover sauces from the week for dipping

It’s pretty easy to turn all this low-carb by just skipping the bread and crackers when they are offered. The two roasted chickens midweek will find their way into the slow cooker for stock, and the leftover meat will be put aside for a meal next week.

I find it easy in the wintertime to have soups frequently. Summer is a much more salad-friendly time of year. But that general plan leaves me with a longing for tomato soup! I haven’t really found a recipe for tomato soup that uses jarred tomatoes and still tastes really rich and good.

In addition to these meals, I also made some pineapple chutney (yeah, I know pineapple isn’t local, it’s one of my cheat foods), queso blanco, crispy pecans and walnuts for snacking on, and I soaked and roasted the seeds from last week’s acorn squash. The rind from the pineapple is soaking away in whey, turning itself into pineapple vinegar to be used in cortido next week. My apple cider vinegar using the Thanksgiving apple pie’s peels and cores is still working, not quite the acid level I’d like, but getting there.

And John has asked for some homemade marshmallow fluff before he goes back to college. How can I say no?

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

I gained three pounds. I know. Everyone else loses weight when they stop grains. I’m one of those who just doesn’t lose weight anymore no matter what. I’m still working on accepting that and trying to get to a place where it doesn’t bother me.

Our food bill went up, and it’s already on the high side for what we can afford. That would be the primary reason I would not choose this diet for the long term. We still have significant almond allergies, so using almond flour is not an option. Coconut flour is more doable, but still something we prefer on rare occasions rather than everyday.

Kate made a treat one evening when I was nearly insane from sugar craving. It’s a grain-free peanut butter cookie and two of these really hit the spot!

Grain-free Peanut Butter Cookies

Grain-Free Peanut Butter Cookies

1 cup freshly ground creamy peanut butter
1/2 cup rapadura
1 egg, beaten

Warm the peanut butter in a pan on the stove on very low heat until it is smooth and soft. Add the sugar and mix well until the sugar is dissolved. Remove mixture from heat, allow to cool a minute or two and add egg. Mix until smooth. Roll into one-inch diameter balls and place on cookie sheet. Flatten with a fork and bake at 350° for 8-10 minutes until golden brown. Serve warm with milk! Makes 6 large cookies, but we prefer making 1/4 inch balls for bite-sized cookies.

Homemade Cottage Cheese
makes 1 cup
1 quart raw milk
3/4 cup white distilled vinegar
a pinch of salt
a few tablespoons whole, raw cream

Heat the milk just to 120° on the stovetop. Remove it from the heat and stir in the vinegar. Stir slowly and gently as the milk separates into curds and whey. Cover the pot and let it sit 30 minutes. Line a strainer set over a bowl with a tea towel or piece of muslin and pour the curds and whey into the strainer. Allow to drain about 5 minutes. Gather up the ends of the cloth or towel and hold the cheese ball under running cold water as you massage, knead and mix around with your hands. In a few minutes, the water draining off the cheese ball will be clear. Wring the cheese out as dry as you can and set it in a bowl. Add a pinch of salt and mix with a fork, breaking the curds up into the size you prefer. Immediately before serving, pour a little cream over the curds.

When it was time to put the Christmas decorations away for the year, I found the plastic mold from a box of Advent calendar chocolates hanging around. Although I like the flavor of coconut oil, it is difficult for me to eat plain because the texture just doesn’t feel right. One thing I can always eat plain, though, is butter! Yum! So, I melted equal parts of butter and coconut oil, washed up the mold and poured the delectable solution into the little hearts. Isn’t it cute? Each heart holds about 1/2 a tablespoonful of mixture. Can I eat two of these a couple times a day? Oh yes, I certainly can!

I’m still considering going grain-free. Anna commented on my Low Carbing It post with some really fascinating info that I’ve been researching. The more I study this issue, the more I think I need to cut out the grains. Totally at first, at the very least for a few weeks. But I’m pretty chicken about asking my family to go down that road with me. Funny, I didn’t think twice about offering them a raw meat meal, but a meal without bread just seems beyond the pale.

So, I’ll start with my coconut oil treats and see what happens.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted this week by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

The Long, Albino Carrot thing

I’m glad I did! I scraped them, like you would a carrot, and julienned it, like you would a carrot, and sauteed them slowly in butter, like you would a carrot. And they tasted…not unlike carrots! There was a definite carrot flavor in there, but it was tempered with a lovely anise-like licorice flavor. This root veggie will be a welcome addition to our winter local fare.

Sauteeing gently in butter

Okay, so the idea of planning a category of food a day is a good one, but sometimes life intervenes. For example, this weekend I was straightening up my food storage area in the garage with Christy. Our garage stays a pretty even temperature year-round, probably because it is underground on three sides. I found some dried white beans as I was straightening a shelf and handed them to Christy saying, “Here, take these upstairs to the kitchen. I’m going to soak them for baked beans later this week.” I guess I was mumbling, or thinking out loud or something, because she proceeded to bring the beans up and soak them herself! I didn’t notice what was in the bowl (she covered it just like she’s seen me do) until I got out the soaked flour for today’s pancakes.

Pancakes for breakfast are such a mixed blessing. I don’t like making pancakes for breakfast because it can take a whole hour to cook as many as I need for my family. Someday I’d like to find a gigantic cast-iron griddle that will work on my electric stovetop, but I’ll bet it’s something I’d have to invent. I like making pancakes for breakfast because it gives me a whole hour standing at the stove to do prep for other meals between flips. I boiled eggs for egg salad, flip; I checked on my fermenting foods in the cupboard, flip; I rinsed my sprouting wheat berries and sunflower seeds, flip; I chopped and sauteed a couple onions and garlic cloves, flip, to which I added the drained soaked beans and got it boiling, flip. I even managed to do the dishes between flips! After everyone had all the pancakes they wanted, I put the leftovers on a cookie sheet in a 150° oven until they were crispy, which took about two hours.

I added some tomato paste, soy sauce, maple syrup, molasses, apple cider vinegar, red pepper flakes and dry mustard to the beans and scooped it into my slow cooker. It cooked away on High until dinner. They were good but something was…missing. Hm. I’ll have to think on that. I’ve never been able to make baked beans like my mother’s, partly because she uses white sugar and brown sugar and molasses and maple syrup and that’s just way too much for me. Don’t get me wrong, they are wicked good, but it kind of takes the health benefits away from the beans to drown them in that much sugar.

The crispy cakes went over well with all but John, who turned up his nose at the idea of pancakes for snack. Christy said, “It’s like having honey on a spoon, then eating the spoon!” Rose ate four of them, but not with honey, with blackberry fruit-only preserves. John has put in a request for scrambled eggs with cheese and toast for breakfast. That with a cup of his special eggnog should give him a really good start on the day tomorrow. I think I’ll go grate that cheese tonight, though, for safety’s sake!