Having read that liver is one of the best organ meats you can buy - in nutritional terms - I decided to try cooking beef liver. This was with great trepidation, because I remember my mum (I'm from England and my mother did her very best to live up to England's awful culinary reputation - may she rest in peace...) used to cook liver for us when me and my sister were kids. And it was awful. So dry you could barely swallow it. The only saving grace was that she served it with bacon and onions. If you took a mouthful of the dry liver with the bacon and onions, you could just about eat it without gagging. She also belonged to the "If you don't eat your dinner, you won't get any pudding!" fraction, so we diligently forced this down our throats. (The woman couldn't cook, but she could bake - her fruit pies were delicious!!!)
So, armed with "Nourishing Traditions", I decided to try cooking liver (just for myself first, nobody else was here for lunch today). And it was scrummy!
The trick was to marinate it in lemon juice for a
long time.
Sally Fallon's recipe recommends "several hours", but for various reasons, (one was fear of eating liver) I didn't have the liver I had put in the fridge with lemon juice yesterday morning for lunch yesterday, so by today it had been marinated for about 24 hours! It looked kind of weird and it is weird to handle, but I did what Sally said (more or less) - dredged it in a bit of flour and popped it in a hot pan and cooked it on both sides for a couple of minutes each. At the same time I had four rashers of bacon and an onion chopped into half rings in another frying pan - cooked in clarified butter.
She recommended cooking the liver and then putting it in a warm oven and
then sautéing the onions for
half an hour!!! This all seemed a bit wasteful in terms of energy and time (I'm not putting the oven on just to keep a bit of liver warm for one person!!!) and I didn't quite understand why you had to sauté the onions for so long. I like my onions well-browned (if not a bit blackish, actually) and I can do them in much less time than half an hour - more like ten minutes.
Anyway, between us, me and Sally made a fine lunch! I didn't have any other veggies with it as it was quite a big portion for little me! I had this at about 2.30pm and it kept me full for absolutely hours. Usually I would eat something with my kids about 7pm, but today I was
not hungry!
I am so proud of myself that I had to share it with the forum! (Nobody round here would appreciate the dimensions of this achievement, I'm afraid...)
amanda