Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

This week is the first really “scary” recipe that we have cooked for French Fridays – one that is being embraced openly by most of the Doristas but many of us had our hesitations and reservations about it.

Chicken Liver Gateau.

Chicken livers were really easy to come by and incredibly cheap, only one pound! So at least making a recipe that I was on the fence about was made a little easier by the cost. The entire cost of the dish was fairly inconsequential – but the taste, was not.

This dish is very simple to whip up, requiring very few ingredients. I skipped making the pickled onions and bought cornichons and a red onion marmalade from the store to make it even easier. Along with salad greens and table water crackers to serve them with.

thank goodness I chopped these on a paper towel! It kept the blood from getting all over everything!

Once dinner was served, I baked up four ramekins worth, although the one recipe would have made five; and about the time we were finished with dinner, the liver cakes were baked.

all the ingredients before they were blended

I plated one just for us to try on a bed of dressed greens, piling on the red onion marmalade, crackers and cornichons on the side to see what combination flattered us the most.

It made a nice orange-ish pink batter!

I sliced off a reasonable portion on my first cracker and topped it with the red onion marmalade and boy was it not pleasant. I didn’t care for the texture of it at all. And this after all the care I took to exactly measure in the finely diced herbs and seasonings because I didn’t want my heavy-handedness with any one herb or spice to be the thing that ruined this dish for me. I was truly not a fan. The smell of it didn’t help much either.

Mei wouldn’t try it. That would be the first French Fridays recipe that was true for.

My husband ate the entire cake and said it didnt taste much like liver in the way he was expecting but it wasn’t bad and he is simply planning on eating the rest of the cakes alone.

Patella got the cake that I plated to photograph today and she, of course, loved it! And it had the bonus of not destroying my blender to make it. The last time I made liver treats for Patella, I didn’t know you had to remove the veins and any other stringy bits and they wrapped themselves around the blades of my blender and killed it.

Talk about bad luck with liver in this house.

Oh well, this won’t keep me from trying the other offal recipes in this cookbook – I’m keeping an open mind about each of them.

To see how the other Doristas fared this week, click here. To join us, pick up a copy of Dorie Greenspan’s “Around My French Table” and get cookin’!

About these ads