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Offal

I reckon I’m a pretty wide-ranging eater, but there are certain things I won’t touch and I will not have people judging me for it.

For example, I won’t eat raw garlic, Jerusalem artichokes, lemon puddings, aniseed or kidneys. And I’m not wild about tongue, either. And the attitude you get from people! It’s as if you’ve announced you’re a vegan. At least people probably don’t give you shit for being a vegan because they assume that you’ve got enough problems as it is.

A thing most people don’t want to eat is offal and I absolutely defend anyone’s right not to want to eat it without being labelled a white-bread-eating food weakling. Offal really isn’t that nice, most of the time. Kidney! ACK! Gag me with a spoon. It’s just about tolerable cut up into minute chunks then cooked for about three days then put in a pie with gravy and steak and topped off with a slab of buttery pastry. Any more real than that and I break out into a sweat.

But some offal is okay. Lamb sweetbreads: tick. Especially served with some kind of very sharp parsley and barley salad thing. Calves’ liver, with bacon and onions and mash: tick.

Chicken liver, turned into a paté OR cooked in a rich sauce of tomato and paprika: tick. Giles does a very nice sticky thing with chicken livers that goes something like this:

Giles’s Mittel Europe Chicken Livers

For two

 1 onion, chopped

 2 garlic cloves

 1 400g packet organic chicken livers (or closest to 400g you can find), washed and sorted for gross bits of sinew or any green bits (gall bladder! Augh!)

 1 tbsp paprika

 a splash of chicken stock (if you’ve got it)

 2 large squeezes of tomato purée or a couple of long squeezes of tomato ketchup

 salt and pepper

 about 100–150ml Marsala, or white wine. Or red wine, really.

 spinach or salad leaves

 some lemon juice

 some parsley if you’ve got it

1 Sweat the onions gently for about 10–15 minutes and then throw in the garlic. Cook that until you start to smell garlic and then throw in the livers.

2 Turn up the heat a bit and cook for about 4 minutes. Then add the paprika, chicken stock, tomato purée, salt and pepper and cook for another 1 minute

3 Pour over the wine then turn the heat down a bit and simmer for about 4 more minutes with a lid on, stirring occasionally until the wine reduces a bit and you get a kind of tomatoey sauce.

4 ‘Arrange’ (i.e. plonk) some spinach leaves on a plate and then spoon over the livers and any juices left in the pan. Squeeze over some lemon juice and scatter parsley over the top.

Instead of having a brownie afterwards, I had an apple. *SMUG*