I am known amongst those closest to me to be a woman who loves to cook but also an extremely picky eater. It is these two things that led to this challenge.
With the help of my sister, I will cook every single one of the recipes from Allegra McEvedy's 'Around the World in 120 Recipes', aiming to do three recipes a week. Why this specific book you ask? Well, it's simple - we wanted adventurous and varying recipes and this book gets great reviews!!
Follow this blog and you will see how my tastes progress as I experiment and how we inspire our weekly menu. We're cooking each dish for a family of three adults and a toddler. Obviously some of the recipes won't necessarily be suitable for the toddler but we'll try and vary as many of them as possible so that she can enjoy the experiment too!
The whole household is looking forward to this challenge because, like many others, we have dug ourselves into a little bit of a food rut. With three working adults, all with their own favourite dishes, it becomes more and more difficult to come up with new and inventive dinners that aren't too time consuming to make.

So, challenge accepted! Lets see how this goes!

Thursday, 7 August 2014

Warm Chicken Liver Crostini (Italy)



This is a recipe for a chicken liver pâté. While I do not enjoy cooked liver, and do not eat it on it's own, I do love pâtés using blended liver - preferably duck. My parents bring Mousse de Canard over from France for me  whenever they come to visit. So I was very excited to try this recipe, having never made it before.  Soph used to work as a challet host where this was on the menu so she has made it many a time, so she took a step back on this recipe and I took the lead. 

 It seemed easy enough to make, and there are very few ingredients, but it was still a challenge.  

 Firstly, chicken livers are rather dangerous to cook (especially on the camping stove that I happened to be using at the time).  They have a tendency to spit and pop in a very loud and irritating way and at a very frequent rate. For the most part, I was stood over a metre away from the stove and ducked back in as quickly as possible to turn them - a sight which Soph found quite amusing. 


Once the livers and bacon are cooked, the ingredients all go into a food processor to be blended.  


 The recipe calls for mirin (which was also hard to come by in France) but suggests using sweet wine as a substitute if you can't find mirin, so we used a sweet Bordeaux instead. 

 Another difficulty with this recipe is that she says to add water (or wine) until you get the right consistency.  I prefer creamy pâtés so I accidentally added a little too much liquid to the recipe and the pate was quite thin when it was warm.  After a quick taste of it, we decided to let it cool and refrigerate it for a little while so that it would solidify.  

 Both warm and cold (liquidy and set) it was an absolutely fantastic pâté. While it didn't look particularly appealing, pâté rarely does in my opinion.  It was a great starter and kept very well in the fridge so I would definitely recommend it.  Aside from being a very impressive starter to serve to guests, it's also very cheap (if you make it in France - and possibly also if you make it where you are) since a tub of chicken livers only cost €1.30 and it made quite a big dish of pâté. We served it on simple water biscuit crackers but it would look even more impressive on home made melba toasts or even served up in the dish with the right presentation. Definitely a must-try for those of you who like pâté and haven't already got a recipe of your own. 





Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)