Pan-fried Liver with Caramelised Onions and Garlic Mustard-Mashed Cauliflower

This is a classic liver-and-onion recipe, but--slight twist-- with a bit of a balsamic vinegar sharpness, and a much lighter cauliflower mash instead of potato, to balance out the richness of the dish.

The most important thing to remember when cooking liver is: DO NOT OVERCOOK. You either quickly sear it on high heat, or slowly braise it over low heat. For this recipe, I'm quickly frying the slices of liver, then topping it off with sweet caramelised onions.

Pan-fried Liver with Caramelised Onions

serves 2

Ingredients

100g lamb's liver (big slices about 1-2 cm thick, trimmed of the membrane, or a friendly butcher should do it for you)

a little bit of plain flour (just to coat, 1/2 a tbsp should be enough)

sea salt, black pepper (to taste)

1 tbsp of olive oil + 1 tsp butter

For the caramelised onions

1 large onion, sliced

1 tbsp of olive oil/ butter

1 tsp dijon mustard

splash of balsamic vinegar

black pepper (I like to be generous with this)

Method

1. Heat the olive oil and butter over medium heat, add the onions to the pan (hot enough such that they sizzle but don't sputter), season with black pepper, then cook until the onions are golden-brown, stirring quite often. Add the mustard and balsamic vinegar, and let it reduce till almost dry. Whole process should take around 20 min.

2. While the onions cook, prep the liver! Season the flour lightly with the salt and pepper. Season the liver too, then coat with the flour.

3. Heat olive oil over high heat in a pan. Add the liver slices and fry till browned and cooked, about 1 min on both sides (but it really depends on thickness and pan etc. just make sure the inside is still slightly pink and the outside is nicely seared). Add that little dab of butter to help caramelise and add flavour.

4. Place liver slices on a plate and scoop the onions and any residual gravy over. Enjoy with cauliflower mash (and deep fried sage leaves if you can)!

Garlic and Mustard- Mashed Cauliflower

serves 2-3

Ingredients

1 medium head cauliflower, chopped into small florets

3 cloves of garlic, chopped finely

2 tsp dijon mustard

3 tbsp unsalted butter

sea salt (to taste), (generous) pinch of black pepper

Method

1. Fry the chopped garlic till lightly browned. (browning the garlic first makes all the difference!)

2. Add the cauliflower florets and enough water to cover the base of the sauce pan, then cover and cook for about 10 min till soft and till water is gone.

3. Remove from heat, but do not let the cauliflower cool! While it's still warm, mash the cauliflower and garlic till smooth.

4. Add the mustard, butter, salt and black pepper and combine well.

I sometimes add homemade cream cheese/parmesan instead of mustard, or chopped chives/spring onion/any other herbs. It's very flexible! This is a great alternative to mashed potatoes if you feel like having something lighter.

Anyway, here are some closing tips for anyone still scared of trying offal because of "that smell":

1. You can soak your liver in a bowl of milk in the fridge until you're ready to cook, then remove and pat dry.

2. Get fresh liver, from the butcher or farmer. Those in the supermarket are usually old, and I admit, does stink.

For people new to liver, these are the main types of liver:

Chicken liver - small, tender, quick-cooking, least strong flavour

Lamb's liver - tender, quick-cooking, mild flavour

Calves' liver - tender, quick-coking, good flavour (I've not tried this, but my butcher tells me it's got fantastic flavour. He also very kindly told me it's quite a bit more expensive than lamb.)

Pig's liver - slower cooking, good strong flavour

Goose liver - for the lucky 5% of the population who can afford it.

This is a carnival entry for Pennywise Platter Thursday by The Nourishing Gourmet and Real Food Wednesday by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

Why we need to learn to eat the "icky" meat

While we're talking about superfoods like kale, I'll take the chance to introduce a superfood that's less widely known/accepted by many people-- organ meats, or offal!

Vegetables and fruits are full of vitamins and minerals and antioxidants, but their micronutrient content pales in comparison to organ meats. Generally, organ meats have 10-100 times more nutrients than muscle meats, and you'll see that traditionally, organ meats were consumed and prized. In TCM for instance, there's a belief that eating the liver is beneficial for your liver, the kidney for your kidney etc. I used to think it's bollocks, but now western medicine is catching up (yes, heh) and scientific research backs up that belief-- the animal's body tends to direct the right nutrients to each organ, so, for e.g. lamb's livers will contain many of the essential nutrients for your liver. 1 serving of liver has well over 100% of the RDA of vitamins B12, A, B2, copper, folate and (easily absorbable) iron.

It's kinder to the earth too, because if you kill an animal, you should make sure you appreciate the sacrifice the animal's made, and make use of the whole animal, not just the nicer/prettier parts.

Note: It's very important to get organ meats from animals that have been pasture-raised and fed naturally, especially because animals tend to store toxins in their fat and liver. Although, frankly, whatever meat you get should ideally be from animals that are raised properly. It really doesn't cost you more (believe me, I'm a stingy student surviving on a budget), as long as you you avoid the usual popular cuts and go for unpopular (but a lot more exciting and flavoursome) cuts or... offal!

Two ways with Ox Heart

[Warning - this post contains offal]

It was supposed to be three.

Three ways with heart.



A hat trick of heart-y preparations to entice the brave and convert the wary whilst trying all the while not to scare off the timid.

The third of these was to be a long, slow braise. I had visions of spoon tender meat in a rich, beefy gravy similar to the French Laundry braised beef short ribs. The reality was a little disappointing.

Most meat that needs slow cooking is a network of fibrous muscle protein and connective tissue layered with strata of fat. As the meat cooks it becomes tender (due to the break down of the collagen) and very tasty.

A braised lamb shank is the classic example – cooked properly a gentle shove with a fork should have the meat collapsing off the bone like a tower block undergoing a controlled demolition.

But heart, I came to learn, is different. The meat is lean, tightly packed and without the necessary additions of collagen and fat that make a truly rib-sticking braise. Rather than falling apart into tasty strands, the meat constricts and seizes up into dense, rubbery nuggets that taste nice enough but texturally are not pleasant.

It was with a heavy heart (arf arf) that I admitted defeat on this one and fed the chunks to some very grateful cats who I doubt appreciated the time, effort and bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon that had gone into the dish.

So, two ways it is.



The first thing you notice about an ox heart is its sheer size. They are great, hulking vast rugby balls of meat. Weighing in at a shade under three kilos, even accounting for the necessary ‘trimming’, there is plenty of meat here. A similarly sized rib of beef would set you back around £45. A three-kilo piece of sirloin closer to £70.

The heart cost a tenth of the price – about £7. Even if it merely served to slake my curiosity it was still cheap.

Once the whole thing had been trimmed of anything that looked even vaguely unappetising (no mean feat considering its size), a third of the meat was thinly sliced to be marinated overnight, a third cut into chunks to braise and a third finely diced for a ragu.

The braise, being something of a failure as already discussed, is probably best not dwelled upon so we shall move swiftly onto the more successful preparations.

Ragu



The first of these was a simple ragu. Finely diced heart meat browned in oil then cooked long and slow with a soffrito of onions, celery and carrot, a little cured bacon, half a bottle of wine, some good beef stock and a tin of tomatoes.

Five hours under a cartouche in an oven barely warmer than a Swedish sauna was enough to create a tasty sauce that works well over pasta but isn’t even close to being as good as one made with cheek.

Far more successful though was the following:

Anticuchos

A South American preparation, anticuchos seems to be a fairly generic term for ‘meat on skewers’ and can be made with almost any type of meat. The most famed, though, are made with beef heart.



Marinated overnight in ground cumin, garlic, chilli and oregano mixed with olive oil and red wine vinegar, the thinly sliced heart is then concertinaed onto wooden skewers before being grilled over hot coals.



Cooked quickly like this means the meat has little opportunity to constrict and toughen up. The light charring of the barbecued meat adds a warm, deep savoury note and the marinade, pepped up with the sharpness of vinegar, really lifts the dish.





After 5-6 minutes over hot charcoal, the meat was picked off the skewer onto a hot flatbread and served with rocket, a few spoonfuls of mayonnaise and the leftover marinade cooked down with some tomato puree.



‘This is a conversion dish,’ claimed the GF, whose initial trepidation evaporated once she got a whiff of the hunger inducing scent that is created when meat is introduced to hot coals. ‘This is seriously good. Really good. Good enough to convince non-offal eaters, in fact.’

She was right. Anticuchos is the sort of food that you could easily dish up and dazzle with at a barbecue. Questions over provenance could easily be waved away with vague mutterings about ‘steak kebab’ until the hungry throng come back for seconds.

By that point they will already have undergone their Damascene moment. Oh, you are offal. But I like you

Beef Cheek Ragu

Beef cheeks can be a little hard to find. Legislation passed in the wake of the BSE scare of the mid 1990s meant they were completely off menu for quite some time and even now a quiet word in your butcher’s ear will likely be necessary to score the bounty.

A general rule of meat cookery runs thus – the more work it does, the longer it cooks. A beef cheek is probably the natural end point of the scale. There aren’t many calories in grass so – being a ruminant – a cow has to get through an awful lot before it feels full and it’s all got to be chewed. At least twice. That’s a lot of work.

The upshot of this is a supremely tasty fist-sized nugget of meat that can be braised in red wine and stock until it’s ready to be balanced on a heap of mashed potato and covered in a rich sauce. The slightest prod with the tines of a fork should have it collapsing into tender meaty strands.

It also makes a staggeringly good and achingly rich ragu. Done this way, two cheeks should be enough for four people.



Trim any excess fat or sinew from the meat, cut into chunks, season with salt and pepper and brown in hot fat in a casserole. Deglaze the pan with white wine vinegar then sweat down some finely diced carrot, celery and onion in olive oil.

Return the meat to the pan with the vegetables, add a large glass of red wine and a carton of passata and cover with a cartouche. Braise the whole lot in a very low oven for six hours by which point the volume of liquid will have halved and the meat should be falling into the sauce.

Serve stirred into pasta and be ready to pledge not to use minced beef again.

Boiled Tongue

As far as titles go, the above is probably about as enticing as ‘How to Par-tay the Mormon Way’ but bear with me on this one. Please.

Granted, taken in turn neither of the two words is particularly exciting and together they create some sort of force field that for many will result in the gag reflex kicking in with gusto. Admittedly even I approached this one with a small amount of trepidation.

Like a badly executed kiss, it started with a tongue. A great big flapping, fresh, wet, grey, spikey tongue. Curled up on the chopping board it resembled some sort of Mephistophelean re-imagining of an evil pet, like a prop from an early David Cronenberg film.



Its size, its weight, its appearance, its texture – everything conspired against it becoming a foodstuff were it not for the good reports I’d had regarding its utter brilliance when cooked.

Although technically offal, there is no reason why tongue should provoke such revulsion. It is muscle in the same way topside or fillet steak is muscle. However, due to the amount of work it does – daily tearing kilos of fresh grass from the earth – it needs some serious cooking. To stop it from drying out it also needs brining. I gave it 5 days but if you’re tempted to try this at home (please do) I’d let it spend at least a week in the brine bucket, possibly even ten days.

To stop it being overly salty it went into fresh water for 24 hours before being slung into the stock pot along with the usual suspects – carrot, celery, onion, garlic, peppercorns and a couple of bay leafs.



Four hours at the merest quivering simmer was enough to cook it through. I’d been reliably informed (thank you once again Fergus Henderson) that tongue is easier to peel (!) when still warm. Even so, a sharp knife was necessary and the process was more of a paring than a peeling. Although not a pleasant process by the time the tough barbed outer skin was removed what sat in front of me was recognisably meat that looked at least as good as a slab of tasty salt beef.

Which is exactly what it was.

Assuming that it would be best fresh from the cooking pot and still warm, it was thinly sliced and crammed into a bagel along with a generous slick of mayonnaise, a handful of rocket and some sliced pickles. The whole lot was topped, inevitably, with the lurid yellow mustard so reminiscent of New York’s finest culinary offerings.



By now any feelings of trepidation had long since evaporated and the first bite was an adventurously large one. It was delicious. It’s as simple as that. Perhaps made even more so by the timidity with which it approached. ‘Under promise and over deliver’ seems to be the mantra of marketing. If so, tongue is the marketer’s dream. Don’t be surprised if it joins cheeks, shanks and trotters in the ‘forgotten cuts’ section of supermarket. Now that will set tongues wagging.

A Wee Scottish Brekkie

Our haggis burst.

One second merrily bobbing away in barely simmering water, the next spilling its mealy guts into the pan. The pale casing constricted, growing opaque as it exuded its contents into what was seconds before clear water.

I fished out the quarter sized haggis, sliced it down the centre, spooned out the insides and plated it up onto a pile of buttery mash and roasted carrots. Underneath was a slick of creamy chicken velouté. I’d read somewhere that a whiskey based sauce was terribly gauche. Strictly for tourists only.

The meal was delicious enough for us both to comment that we should certainly be eating haggis more regularly and rue the fact that there was considerably less on the plate than there should be.

But what of the remainder, currently swelling and clouding the water in a pan on the hob?



The water was sieved and the resultant sludge strained overnight. By morning the swollen oats had turned sticky transforming the gloop into something resembling a cake. Some was spooned into the cats’ bowls – cupboards bereft of feline food - the rest moulded into a neat patty and fried in a little oil before being crowned with a poached egg.

The breakfast of Scottish champions. Which explains an awful lot.

Szechwan Tripe

In order to be rendered even vaguely edible, tripe must be cooked for at least three hours. And that’s only after it’s been soaked, disinfected and bleached.

Bleached.

Of course, unbleached, or green tripe, is available (most notably in France) but frankly the thought of eating something that until recently was in such close proximity to a vast quantity of cow shit is not that appealing in itself. Bring on all the bleaching agents possible, I say.

Having lost my offal training wheels some time ago (probably when I munched on brain) I felt sufficiently ready for tripe which seems to be making something of a comeback.

I’d barely finished editing the accompanying photos when I read this great piece on Word of Mouth. So now seems good time to plough this particular furrow. Or tap into the ‘tripegeist’, if you will (sorry).

Admittedly I was scared. The slab of tripe had been in the freezer for six months and I was convinced that the GF wouldn’t be able to stomach (sorry. Again) this particular adventure. Her trip to Vegas presented the perfect opportunity.



Trippa ala Romana (tripe cooked with onions, garlic and tomatoes) was initially at the top of my list but reading about Szechwan restaurant Chilli Cool convinced me otherwise.

Bird’s Eye chillies are notoriously hot and Szechwan peppercorns contain a compound called hydroxy alpha senshool which causes a numbing sensation in the mouth. Surely this heat/anasthesia combo would render the tripe so insignificant as to be at least bearable?

Wrong.

After cooking down some red onion, Thai chillies and ginger in a hot pan I added the sliced tripe and then the braising liquid of soy sauce, chicken stock and dark rice wine vinegar along with a hefty number of dried bird’s eye chillies and enough Szechwan peppercorns to mimic the effects of a stroke.



Even through all this the niff of the tripe was palpable. Damp and slightly fetid, it called to mind an old house with a leaky roof, home to a family of dogs and wet sheep. It wasn’t nausea inducing but certainly lodged itself in the nostrils.

It cooked for three hours at which point the tripe was removed and the cooking liquor strained and reduced to a syrupy consistency. I stir-fried some finely sliced ginger, garlic and onion then added the tripe to the wok before spooning over the reduced sauce and adding noodles. Just to make absolutely sure I would neither taste nor feel the tripe in went some more chillies and peppercorns.



It was finished with spring onions, roasted peanuts and even more spices then a spoonful of sugar and a squeeze of lime.

The smell had certainly subsided when eating time came around. It actually smelled and looked thoroughly appetising, especially after fortifying myself with a couple of beers.

In went an enthusiastically large mouthful.

And there it remained whilst I chewed. And chewed. And chewed. Long after the flavour had disappeared, the rubbery nugget persisted, moving from side to side and getting no more tender than a piece of cheap gum. I tried. I really did. But there was no way I was going to force this bouncy ball of cow’s stomach into my own.

Not only was the texture seemingly galvanized, the flavour of the tripe remained even through the atomic spices. Thanks to the numbing properties of the peppercorns I could happily have endured root canal surgery but there was still an underlying and noticeable taste, not quite unpleasant but certainly not nice.

The rest of the tripe was picked out and left on the side of the plate whilst the tasty noodles sated my hunger.

It wasn’t all bad. The noodle dish would be delicious with beef shin, pork belly or even chicken thighs but I’ve found my limit. Even the hardiest of holistic, nose-to-tail eaters have to draw a line somewhere and mine comes right before you need to crack open the bleach.

Assiette de Tete de Porc or ‘How to turn a hog’s head into a delicate trio of starters’

[Scroll down for recipes]

Carnivorous detachment is something many of us are guilty of.



By that I mean there is a deliberate and tangible epistemic distance between product and animal. It’s one that we gloss over. Choose to ignore, and prefer to exist in a state of happy ignorance about where meat comes from.

Of course, when it really comes down to it we know that something, some thing, died so that we can consume the animal protein on our plate but there is a vast chasm between the casual awareness of this and the genuine hands on reality.

A few weeks back I went to a slaughterhouse. It was clean and quiet and had been shut down for the day. But the pervading atmosphere was one of death.

It was discernable not only in the smell, but in the walls, the floors, the shape of the pens and the grim actuality of the chains, hooks and instruments required to turn a cow (or in this case a water buffalo) into something the consumer is happy to eat.

There was no slaughter that day. But it wasn’t necessary to see it in order to have beliefs affirmed: that, for me, eating meat comes with a responsibility to appreciate the reality of husbandry, slaughter and butchery.

I’m not here to proselytise. Merely explain the position I’ve chosen to take and hopefully use that as a springboard for what follows.



Naturally there was a culinary dimension to cooking a pig’s head. It’s a challenge. A gastronomic gauntlet. A badge of honour, almost. But it also represents the face-to-face dimension of being a carnivore. Literally.

Where one can cook a steak with little thought to animal from which it came, a head doesn’t offer this luxury. It is clearly an animal, and one that we are familiar with. Looking at the apparent smile that seems to spread across the face of a dead pig one can’t help but think it is in a state of blissful ignorance as to its fate: the dinner plate.

I’d set myself the task of cooking a rather ambitious menu and then serving it up to brave diners who had kindly volunteered to accompany me on this little culinary journey. As a perfectionist, though, this wasn’t going to happen without a practice run.

The brain dish wasn’t a winner and certainly not worth the effort of cleaving open the head – a task which took close to three quarters of an hour. But the rest had potential.

So, here it is. A first draft anyway. Complete with recipes


Trio of Pig’s Head

[NB – The only element of this I had help with was asking the butcher to remove the eyes. I have a funny thing with eyes. I was 21 before I could consider the possibility of getting contact lenses.]

For this you will need one pig’s head. Remove the eyes and discard. Remove the ears close to the head and wash well. Use a boning knife to remove as much of the cheek meat as possible, cut into inch long pieces and set aside.

Cut off about an inch and a half to two inches of the snout and discard (a large saw is probably the best piece of equipment for this).

Place the head and ears into a large stockpot with a crude mirepoix of carrots, onion, celery, leeks and garlic. Cover the whole lot with water and bring it to a gentle boil. Let it simmer for half an hour, skimming off any scum that rises to the surface. After thirty minutes reduce the heat and let it bubble away very gently for three hours.

To confit the cheeks, finely chop some rosemary and bay leaf. Salt the cheeks and sprinkle over the herbs. Put the whole lot into a roasting tray and add enough duck or goose fat to come halfway up the cheek pieces. Cook in a cool oven – about 125 degrees C – for three hours. Turn the pieces every half hour or so. Once cooked leave to cool.

Remove the ears and head from the stock pot and let them cool. Strain the stock through a sieve and then a muslin cloth, bring it back to the boil and reduce it by about half. Remove about 250ml from the pot and add it to another saucepan. Reduce that by half. This will make the setting jelly for the brawn pâté. The rest of the stock can be used to make soup.

Once the head is cool enough to handle strip it of its meat, of which there should be plenty – about 300-400g. Set to one side and discard the bones.

Take a deep breath. You’re almost there.

Confit of pig’s cheek



Remove the meat from the duck or goose fat and slice off the skin (which can be used to make pork scratchings – bake ina moderate oven for about 20 minutes). Use two forks to shred it roughly, a little like making rillettes. Heat the leftover fat and strain through a sieve.

Season the meat with salt and black pepper then stuff it tightly into a sterilised jar. Pour over the liquid fat, screw on the lid and let it cool. This should keep for weeks and is great served with cornichons and fresh, crusty bread.


Brawn pâté



Brawn is a rough and ready item of charcuterie usually made with the entire head with chunks of meat set into jelly. This is a more delicate, refined version, much more similar to a pâté or rough sausage. The jelly is almost indiscernible and is used predominantly as a binding agent.

Finely chop the meat. Season it with salt and pepper then add some chopped sage, about six or seven leaves. In a mixing bowl add about 50ml of the reduced stock to the meat until it starts to come together then turn out onto a square of cling film or tin foil.

Roll the meat into a tight sausage and leave in the fridge overnight. Once set, slice the meat into circles, fry in a little olive oil for thirty seconds each side and serve with salad leaves.

Crispy fried pig’s ears



These are delicious. Not just passable or ‘OK. For an ear’, but really tasty. A little like calamari but slightly tougher.

Thinly slice the ear and coat in seasoned flour. Make up a batter (I used the ginger beer batter again – it works really well) and deep fry the battered ears for about two minutes. Drain on kitchen paper and serve with sea salt, a little lemon juice and some mayonnaise or sweet chilli sauce.

In Over My Head?

As the old adage goes, you learn something new everyday.

Yesterday I learnt three things. Did you know, for instance, that the greyhound accelerates to 45 miles per hour in a single second from a standing start? Zero to forty five in a second? Amazing. It is the second fastest land mammal on earth.

The other two factoids I gleaned through empirical, hands-on research and part of me wishes I was still in a happy cloud of blissful ignorance. Here we go: the brain of a pig is surprisingly small. Tiny, in fact. About the size of a duck’s egg.


['Two squeaks, or not two squeaks? That is the question']

The second? There is a wonderful nugget of meat that sits just below the eye socket behind the cheek bone, only accessible with an adventurous finger after the head of a pig has been simmered long and slow. It falls away in a rather satisfactory fashion, a neat little piece of tasty pork.

I know this because of Project Napoleon.

Project Napoleon, named after the Stalin-esque character in Animal Farm, began quite by accident.

I’d had a request to cook (and eat) brain for the Nose to Tail Tuesday feature (thanks for that). With calves’ and lambs’ brain still illegal, it was up to the reliable old porker to provide the means by which this terrifying prospect could be realised.

I put in a reluctant request with my butcher and received a phone call on Wednesday: ‘I’ve got a pig’s head here for you? Do you want the whole thing or just the brain?’



The question was a no-brainer (ha ha ha – sorry). The head is a culinary challenge I’ve been keen to take on for quite some time: a real test that separates those who merely profess a predilection for the holistic approach and those with genuine gastronomic fortitude.

Why does the head divide the cooking fraternity so? It’s about emoting. As humans we have evolved to read faces, to try and glean as much information as possible from them. The slightest movement can give away a secret, a feeling or an emotion.

Presented with the head of an animal, there is a near certainty that we will lean towards anthropomorphosis. And pigs, even deceased and decapitated ones, look like they are smiling. They look content. Happy even. So turning it into food is difficult.



Once this hurdle has been leapt over, the rest is easy.

One option for turning this insanely cheap meat (this one cost just under three pounds) into a viable foodstuff is to make a tête de fromage, not a uniquely male medical condition but a rustic pâté also known as brawn.

Here the entire head is simmered gently for three hours in water and stock vegetables. Once cooled, the meat, fat and skin is stripped from the skull, the stock strained, reduced and turned into a jelly into which the meat is set.

Yum.

Or not.

I wanted something more refined. I’ve always believed that true culinary skill lies in turning the ridiculous into the sublime. The drab into the delicious. Here was a challenge.

Driving home from the butcher’s I started putting a menu together, one that would showcase this unusual ingredient to its full potential.


Head Over Heels

So, here is the plan – to be served to adventurous dinner guests, just as soon as we find some. Any takers?

Pre dinner drinks with pork scratchings and ears Ste Menehould

Deep fried brain on toast with champagne

Sour Apple amuse

Pea & Bacon Soup made with ‘head stock’ with homemade bread

Refined brawn pâté with sage

Confit cheek with apple jelly, candied bacon and summer leaves

Dessert

Cheese and port

Let’s see just what this head can do…

Nose to Tail Tuesday (N3T) - Bone Marrow

It’s been a while but you have been very patient, for which I am most grateful. So thank you.

There has been no slacking, I promise. But I have had a rather surreal couple of weeks.

I’ve taken part in a pilot for a new TV quiz show, been spoonfed sea urchin by Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall, spilled pink wine over a renowned stand-up comic and Radio 4 stalwart, listened to a restaurant critic talk about his masturbatory preferences, watched buffalo mozzarella being made and dined with a former F1 world champion in his rather palatial house.

Phew.

I’ve also been snowed under with teaching, what with it being exam season and all. There’s a dichotomy for you – hob-nobbing with ‘slebs one minute and then trying to teach the finer points of the British constitutional settlement the next.

No wonder there’s been little time for writing. There’s been hardly enough time to eat, let alone trot out a few hundred words about each experience.

But on with the show.

Today Nose to Tail Tuesday makes its triumphant return with a genuine Fergus Henderson classic: roasted bone marrow (marrow also features in a braised beef dish which shall, hopefully, follow at around 12 noon British Summer Time tomorrow).

It’s thought that eating bone marrow was what contributed to one of our species’ great leaps forward, sometime around 750,000 years ago.



Nutritionally rich and inaccessible to non-tool wielding creatures, marrow enabled early hominids to lead lives less focussed on where the next meal was coming from, giving them time to develop such skills as conversation, sarcasm and perfecting the Cruyff turn.

It has long been a fixture of French cuisine (in Bordelaise Sauce, par example) but has been largely ignored on this Fair Isle in favour of McTucky’s Fried Chicken and other such culinary abominations.



But no longer.

I have to admit, I was excited about this one. After Kidney-gate (not to mention the potential Great Tripe Ordeal of May 2009) I was keen to get back on track with something that appealed.

Anthony Bourdain is a man whose opinion I trust on just about everything. I blame him almost entirely for my food fixation. So, when he says that his last meal on earth would be roasted bone marrow on toast, I’m willing to bow to his judgement. I knew before I started that this would be delicious.

Getting hold of the necessary ingredients is easy and free. Yes, you heard me right: free. Your friendly neighbourhood butcher might just leap over the counter and plant a big meaty kiss on that pretty, or handsome, face of yours when you ask to relieve him of his bones.

Why? Because otherwise he has to pay the local council to have them taken away and disposed of. The less he has to put in those big black sacks, the better. Grab some pig skin and chicken carcasses whilst you’re at it. And don’t forget to actually buy something.

Walk out of there with nothing but a bag of freebies and that kiss might just be followed by a face full of spittle.

Having sourced the goods, have someone (maybe the butcher, maybe a carpenter or amiable tree surgeon) saw the bone into 2-3 inch chunks. Place them, standing up, in a roasting tray and then put the whole lot into an oven (let’s say 180 degrees C) for about 20 minutes.

And relax. You’re done (apart from toasting some bread).

Oh, the smells, the glorious meaty smells. The slightly disturbing shimmer of the now jelly-like marrow. The trepidation. The excitement. The…

…absolute, complete, wondrous deliciousness of the final product. Served on toast with a pinch of sea salt, this is something new, something fabulous.



If you poached a fresh egg in butter and then served it on toast, perfectly seasoned, you would have something similar to roasted bone marrow. But not quite as nice.

It is sweet and faintly meaty and soft and buttery and rich and salty and the crunch from the toast is the perfect foil to the texture of the marrow itself. It is one of the most delicious dishes I’ve ever had the pleasure of sampling. Tony, once again, you are correct.

And all this for minimal effort and negligible cost.

N3T4 – Roasted Bone Marrow: a great big hunk of success.

Fancy a little more? Why not follow me on Twitter?

Nose to Tail Tuesday (N3T) - Kidney

You can be so cruel. I was worried for this one.

Kidney has been my bête noire for quite some years.



Fifteen years ago, I made a solemn vow never to knowingly eat it ever again. Ever.

When I was twelve I stayed over at a friend’s house. For dinner, his mother (an excellent cook) pulled a stunning looking pie from the oven. The golden suet pastry glistened and the gravy inside was rich and dark.

It looked great.

One mouthful in was enough to put me off kidney forever. The strong uric smell. The faint ammonia tang. I gipped uncontrollably – not ideal behaviour for a house guest - and decided that some things were not meant to be consumed.

Kidney rapidly moved into second place on the list (tinned tuna still resides proudly and unwaveringly at the list’s summit).

I knew that it was a grim inevitability that this particular piece of offal would grace N3T at some point. I didn’t expect it to be so early on but thanks to a request from Tiramisu, here it is. In week four of the project.

‘Would you like me to take the fat off for you?’ asked the butcher. Each dark brown conker-like organ was surrounded by a dense covering of cream fat.



‘No thanks,’ I replied, wanting to experience the entire process and also hoping to acquire a large quantity of dripping, perfect for roasting potatoes.

By the time I got them home, I’d formulated a dish in my head: kidneys fried in their own fat and served with mustard mash, wilted greens, glazed shallots, slow roasted lamb breast and parsley and mint sauce. A red wine, lamb and rosemary jus would hopefully mask the flavour of the centre-piece enough to repress the gag reflex.

The lamb breast was there to ensure a decent meal even if the kidney proved to be totally inedible. A substitute already in play.



After the kidneys had been peeled (peeled!) I cut them in half bracing myself for the smell of men’s nightclub toilet at one am…

…but it wasn’t to be. Cue surprise one.

The niff was gentle, not unpleasant. Very faintly uric, of course, but no where near as pungent as I was expecting.

The centre of each was cut out and they were soaked in a water/vinegar bath (3:1) for about fifteen minutes (to neutralise the alkalinity) before being dried. For the cooking, they were seasoned with salt and pepper and fried over a high heat in some of the rendered suet fat.

The lamb breast was braised then slow roasted before being fried in olive oil just before serving (more on this wonderful cut next week) and the whole lot piled onto a plate in a faintly ordered fashion with the potatoes, onion, greens and sauces.

Cue surprise two: the kidney was good.

Let’s not get carried away, however. In this sense ‘good’ means ‘didn’t make me dry heave into a napkin until my stomach muscles ached.’




But it was perfectly edible. Tasty even. The richness of the sauce proved sufficient in masking the flavour I was so scared of and although half a kidney was more than enough and I won’t be making any efforts to cook them again, I was pleasantly surprised.

As were my guinea pigs. This week due to location it was my younger brother and his girlfriend. Both cleared their plates. Bruv even went back for more. A good sign indeed.

So, another success for N3T, albeit a partial one. But at 50p each (the same price as the hearts) you can’t really complain.

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[Note on the photos - no DSLR this week so had to wrestle with a compact. More difficult than I remembered.]

Nose to Tail Tuesday (N3T) - Lambs' Hearts

Not only are we moving away from the magnificent pig this week, having stuck resolutely to the extremities for the last fortnight (with cheek and tail), we’re heading towards the centre of the beast.

Right to the very heart, in fact.




Despite enjoying exactly the same biological construction as muscle tissue, the heart is firmly within the bracket loosely titled ‘offal’. Why? Because it does something. It performs a function, a function with which we are conspicuously familiar.

Whilst I’ve cooked the occasional pate, offal is not something I’m familiar with. Part of the philosophy behind this feature is to attempt to rectify this glaring omission in my culinary experience.

I’ll admit now that I am squeamish about certain things but I’m also rapidly learning to put aside my fears and prejudices. Partly because I think it important, partly because I hope it makes for good reading.

The same could also be said for my increasingly courageous and accommodating girlfriend. It’s one thing to cook ‘the nasty bits’ for yourself, quite another to foist them upon your loved ones.

‘I knew you were going to walk out of there with something odd,’ she said to me last Saturday as we exited the deceptively cavernous Middle Eastern supermarket on Cambridge’s Mill Road.

I tried to defend my actions, admittedly hard to do when clutching a small plastic bag containing two lambs’ hearts. ‘But they were only fifty pence each,’ I offered hopefully and somewhat ineffectively.

I failed to convince myself, despite my outward confidence.

‘It’s just like a steak,’ I added.

‘It’s not though, is it? It’s a heart. I know what it does and I’ve got one. I don’t have any steaks or fillets but I do have a heart. They are quite important.’

It was a good point. There is a linguistic difference when talking about meat: pigs become pork. Cows become beef and the names of the cuts are often comfortingly vague: rack of lamb, sirloin, brisket, fillet.

With offal it is a different story.

Offal speaks to you in plain language. Sure, there is the occasional softener (sweetbreads, for example) but mostly it is unadorned: liver, kidney, brain and heart. We can relate to these. We know what they do. We have them, as had been adroitly pointed out.

‘I really don’t think I can eat heart.’

This was going to be a challenge. But one I was looking forward to.

There are, it seems, three ways to cook heart. They can be stuffed and roasted, sliced and fried like a steak (no more than medium rare, unless you wish to be chewing on it for a month), or slow cooked in a braise.

Being a fan of the magical alchemy of slow cooking, I chose the latter, sure that if I could convince my most honest critic, I could convince almost anyone.

Braised Lambs’ Hearts with onion and black olive pie, spinach, nettle and mint puree, fondant potato and glazed carrots



Once the sinew and fat has been trimmed away and the heart meat cut into manageable pieces, it takes on a more familiar appearance. It looks, to all intents and purposes, like meat.

Knowing what works, all that was needed was to coat the pieces in seasoned flour, brown them in a hot pan then add them to the Le Creuset along with some onion, garlic, carrot and rosemary. Topped up with red wine and lamb stock, the whole lot goes into a cool oven to cook away for at least two hours.

This is, generally, a good approach to take with any number of cheap cuts which need the low temperatures and lengthy cooking times to break down the connective tissue and collagen that holds the meat together. The benefit is a deliciously rich and unctuous stew with meat as tender as any prime cut.

While spoonfuls of this could easily be served alongside a baked potato or underneath a golden pie crust, the Thomas Keller school of cookery (and if anyone knows a thing or two about food, it is that man) advocates discarding the vegetables (which have already imparted its flavours into the pot), removing meat and reducing the sauce down to a thick, sticky jus.

So that’s what I did.

100ml of cassis liqueur was added to a pan along with the same amount of gravy from the stew and a few cubes of frozen beef stock. A couple of sprigs of rosemary and a split clove of garlic were also dropped in before the whole lot was reduced down. After passing through a fine sieve, the meat was returned back to the jus to warm through.

Although refined, this dish screamed ‘hearty’ (excuse the pun). And what could be heartier than a pie?

I remembered reading somewhere that in parts of France, lamb is often served with black olives. It seemed like a flavour combination that would work so I fried off some onions in olive oil, added some finely chopped black olives and then made a basic vegetable suet pastry to house the faintly sweet mix. Brushed with eggwash, they took barely ten minutes in a hot oven.

Mint is also a classic accompaniment with lamb but instead of a sweet and vinegary mint sauce of the type that graces dinner tables across the land every Sunday, I plumped for a more delicate side of spinach, nettle and mint puree (cook the leaves – one part fresh mint, one part nettle, two parts baby leaf spinach – in a little water, blitz, drain and season).

For the rest of the vegetables, sweet glazed carrots and fondant potatoes, cooked in a little chicken stock, completed the dish.



So, to get to the heart of the matter (sorry), how was it?

It wasn’t just surprisingly good, it was deliciously good. It was the sort of food that somehow has the ability to make you very happy indeed. It was rich, tasty, satisfying and all those other things that go into making a successful braised dish.

The heart had a deep flavour though not over-powering. It was ever so slightly ferric, like very mild liver but also deeply meaty. Texturally it had bite but wasn’t chewy or tough. The small morsels offered a little resistance but more than compensated in flavour. This is everything that is good about food.

‘Can I quote you?’ I said to my girlfriend after she had proclaimed it ‘completely delicious, so good. It’s possibly the best thing you’ve ever cooked. I can’t believe you got me to eat heart and enjoy it this much! Mmmmm, so, so good!’

‘Of course you can quote me,’ she replied. So I just did.

Verdict: N3T – Lambs’ hearts: a complete and utter success. Do again? With absolute certainty. And at fifty pence a go, it is almost sacrilegious not to buy these when they are available.

Any changes? Serve with buttery mash and wilted spinach. Simple, hearty and, in the words of my girlfriend ‘so, so good.’

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