Going For Pickle, Or Hot Dog

We eat a chicken a week around here. It’s easy to buy in advance, and the one- to three-day salting technique provides flexibility.

Whole chickens usually come with that baggy of parts, which is when my OCD tendencies kick in and I feel compelled to use them somehow. The neck thingy is good for lunchtime gruel. I use the [googling to see what the fuck the thing is — oh, right that’s what I thought it was called] gizzard in gruel, too, but I’m not sure what flavor it imparts. Occasionally there are hearts. There were two in this chicken. And then of course there is the liver (or livers, if you’re lucky).

The liver is kind of a robust flavor to add to gruel, so I usually don’t use it in there, but then it ends up not ever being used, so I’ve been determined to use it. Lately I’ve been doing a quasi pate.

Today I had in my head “pickle” or “hot dog,” so I tried this:

Ground coriander
Dill
Mustard
Onion powder
Garlic powder
Salt
Pepper
Chicken liver sauteed in butter with hooch brandy flambe.
Greek yogurt

It was all good. The yogurt and coriander gave it a tart taste which made it taste light. We had leftover bread that we used to dip in the sauce.

The Problem With Steak

The problem with steak is that you sometimes feel you need to “atone” with something “less heavy” the next day. Which is how one of us started leafing through Madhur Jaffrey’s At Home with Madhur Jaffrey. Honestly, everything I’ve made from that book has been great, it’s just that it’s hard to gear up for vegetables. Part of what makes At Home so good is that most, if not all, of the recipes are super simple and not very time consuming. Jen alighted on Potato and Pea Curry (page 168). Which was good. She compromised by suggesting a kofta of some sort. I flipped to the Baked Pate-Kebabs recipe (page 23) and got distracted by “pate.” So instead of a loaf of ground turkey sliced thin we had ground lamb mixed in with a bastardized version of chicken liver pate (using livers from the baggies in some whole chickens we had) along with the fragrant flavors of the Indian spices the original recipe details. This was good, though liver becomes really sticky for some reason, at least until you add the egg.

Chicken Liver Sort-Of Pate Bowdlerized From Joy Of Cooking (Page 725)
Not 8 tablespoons of butter but rather one or two;
No shallots (didn’t have any);
No apples (I’m sure it’s a good touch but no);
Two chicken livers (not a pound);
Hoochy brandy, instead of Calvados or Cognac;
Either ricotta cheese or yogurt instead of heavy cream;
Immersion blender suffices.