Cooking/Recipes, Health & Fitness, Paleo, Uncategorized

Liver Bomb

As I’ve mentioned a couple of times, by using www.paleotrack.com to track my food intake, I’ve realized that it’s really hard to get the RDA of minerals.  In an attempt to rectify this (without having to take 10 different pills each morning), I’m trying to incorporate more liver in our diet.  I ground up a pound of chicken liver in the food processor, and every time I made a ground-meat dish this week, I added in 1-3 tablespoons of liquefied liver.  It looked pretty gross, but you can’t really taste it.  I didn’t use up all the ground liver this way, so I spooned the remainder into ice cube trays and froze it.  This way I can add a cube or two to meat as I cook it.

The vendor at the Farmer’s Market sells the liver in 2 lb batches, so I used the other pound to make Deli Chopped Liver.  First of all, handling liver is pretty disgusting. It’s red, bloody, and looks like huge leeches.  Secondly, it took about 4 days for the liver and onion smell to get out of the house.  Thirdly, the resulting product was just OK.  I only ate an appreciable amount the evening I came home from having a couple of drinks with some friends.  Deli Chopped Liver is the kind of thing that just doesn’t really sound good until you’ve lowered your natural defenses with some alcohol.  Fourthly, I took some up to my parents’ so that my Dad, who likes and will try everything, could try it.  He did not like the looks of it AT ALL.  It is a pretty unappetizing shade of tan, admittedly.  But, trooper that he is, he tried it.  He did not like the taste of it AT ALL either.  He made some weird, “hewwww hoooooo” coughing noise when he ate it.  Consequently, due to the aforementioned reasons, I will never make this recipe ever again. I will just continue to grind up the liver and sneak it into meat dishes. You are forewarned now, if you ever come to my house for hamburgers or meatloaf.

I tried another recipe this week that turned out disappointing: Cauliflower Muffin Bites.  This recipe sounded really good, and I almost always like recipes from www.marksdailyapple.com, but neither Tim nor I were fans of this one.  First of all, it created a ton of dirty dishes – food processor bowl and blade, glass mixing bowl, muffin pan, towel for wringing out the excess water, etc.  And the resulting product did not have a ton of flavor; it was pretty bland.  It wasn’t worth the effort, IMHO.  This morning, however, I broke up 4 of the muffins and sauteed them in some bacon grease with more salt & pepper, and some cinnamon.  We ate it with scrambled eggs doused with hot sauce.  That was pretty tasty.

I tried another new recipe that was a roaring success:  Southwestern Frittata.  I printed this recipe out ages ago but just never got around to trying it.  The recipe seemed so simple and basic – how could it be THAT great?  Well, I finally tried it this week, and Tim and I absolutely LOVED it!!  It is super easy to make, uses ingredients I almost always have on hand, and it makes A LOT.  We got at least 3 meals out of this.  This will definitely go into our regular rotation.

And there’s my recipe update for the week.  We did good eating at home this week, but for some reason we still have a lot of food in the fridge!  I think I might be able to get by without a major grocery store trip until mid next week.  Oh!  At the Farmer’s Market I picked up some really nice-looking beets.  I’m going to try my hand at Beet Kvass.  I’m excited to see how it turns out.  My water kefir is doing amazing (I’ll write another post on that later), so I think my fermenting luck has turned.

Hope you have a great Sunday.  It’s 75 and sunny here in Iowa.  Tim and I have tons of plans for relaxing today (biking and sitting outside by a fire).  I can’t wait. 🙂