morsels & sauces

Oh, pâté, how I love you. We have had a relationship for years, mostly because first I ate you in your truffled form , thus establishing a love of you in your most expensive state. Then I ate you in your country form, thus establishing that I love you any way you come. Then I just ate you whenever I could, while still trying to exhibit some restraint. Consequently, when Christmas Eve dinner rolled around and I saw you staring back on me from the pages of Donna Hay's Entertaining , I knew we were destined for one another. I couldn't find duck livers for you--in part because of my poor planning on the day before Christmas when everyone and their neighbor happened to be at the grocery store purchasing their last-minute supplies. Instead, we had to go with chicken livers. I think we did alright in the end. Then, I needed to purchase cognac, a liquor that I know little about. However, a very nice, very young man at the liquor store told me that cognac is simply a very...

Adapted from Cookbook #40.5:  The Country Cooking of Ireland (2009) Recipe: Liver in Whiskey Cream Sauce Okay, I said I would make this.  The whole point of beginning this blog was to get me out of my comfort zone and to use (really use!) the cookbooks that I own.  It was meant to inspire me to cook again, to try something new. When I bought this cookbook, I never knew it would lead to this:  Liver.  Onions.  Whiskey.  This cookbook proudly has an entire chapter devoted to offal, the subtitle of which is "The Irish Touch."  Isn't that fabulous? The book admits that many Americans do not eat offal, in part because we no longer have to eat it (McDonald's has made short order of that).  Thus we discard the tongue, the liver, the kidneys, or we grind them up into sausages so we don't have to confront what they truly are.  This chapter suggests we might do well to change our ways.  We're missing ...