Livers and Mistakes

With the surprising liver within my chicken from recipe #7, I decided to make this recipe from Epicurious.

Chicken Liver Crostini

7 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 small onion, finely chopped
4 anchovy fillets
1 garlic clove, minced
12 ounces chicken livers
1/3 cup dry white wine (I left this out cause I didn't have any)
1 cup canned low-salt chicken broth
2 teaspoons chopped fresh sage
1/2 teaspoon finely grated lemon peel

1 French-bread baguette, sliced into 1/3-inch-thick rounds

Heat 4 tablespoons of the oil. Add onions, anchovies, and garlic, until tender over medium heat. Turn up heat to medium high, add liver and brown. This is where you are supposed to add the white wine, and wait till the liquid is absorbed. I skipped straight to adding the chicken stock and sage. Let the meat simmer till fully cooked and liquid is reduced. Pull meat out once it is done, and keep simmering stock if necessary to reduce. Place meat and some of the liquid in a food processor, and process by pulses until chunky. If needed, add more liquid (but I doubt you will, the recipe calls for way more liquid than is actually necessary). Add lemon peel, and salt and pepper to taste (do not forget this step! I ate my first couple of bites without the lemon, and it made a huge difference).

Brush the rest of the oil on the bread, and toast. Spread the liver on the bread, and eat.

While I was preparing this, I was really worried that I wouldn't like it, because I could not remember ever having eaten liver. And as soon as I tasted it, I was like, oh, I've had pate like a million times, and fois gras too, silly Ana. But, cooking it was nonetheless an interesting activity. I didn't really have 12 ounces of liver, I just had one, so I roughly cut down the recipe to make the amounts correctly. Like I said above, the first few bites I had did not have lemon, salt or pepper, and it made a huge difference. I don't think I'll go out of my way again to make this dish, but if I come across liver again, I will now what to do with it. :)

So in the interest of multitasking, I also had pinto beans and garbanzo beans cooking on the stove because I'd run out of refried beans and hummus. The pinto beans came out perfectly, better than last time. But the garbanzo beans took a little too long, and the cooking time ran into the finale of Project Runway. I heard some sizzling, but I thought water had just spilled out of the pot. During the second commercial break, I went to go stir the beans and I realized that they were completely dry. Zero water. And of course, the beans had burnt. So I had to throw away a cup of garbanzo beans and 1/4 of an onion. Boo. I blame Project Runway. Lesson: make sure beans have enough water!

Valentines Day and the discovery of old mistakes

For valentine's day last week, my sweetie gave me a gift to help me with The Challenge. He gave me Diana Kennedy's The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, which is a combination of her first three books. According to wikipedia (the source of all knowledge), Kennedy is ... actually, it turns out Kennedy's page provides almost no information. According to Elise at Simple Recipes, she is "The grande dame of Mexican cooking." Because I was visiting him last weekend, and could therefore not cook (he lives in a dorm), I had to content myself with reading the book. (Yes, I read cookbooks. This is not the first time. I'm still slightly embarrassed by it though.)

I have not yet finished it, but it did bring to light why my enchiladas were so terrible. Apparently, you are supposed to lightly fry the tortillas before rolling them, so that the dish is moist. It is not enough to pour the sauce over the dish. That will not make them moist enough. It is also not essential to bake them. And, good tortillas should be used (though I did not need the book to tell me this). My tortillas were not good. A rolling pin does not seem to be an acceptable method to form corn tortilla's by any standard that I can find. They should be formed either by "patting" by hand (33 pats is the perfect number, according to Kennedy) or by using a tortilla press. But the lesson learned is that I am not yet comfortable enough in Mexican cuisine to be able to fly by the seat of my pants, so I will have to follow recipes for a while.

I had hoped to cook at least once this week, but it was an exhausting week at work, I never made it home before 8:30pm, and I don't want to start cooking at that time. So no new food posts for now. But, a list of things to anticipate:

Beans (I have them, I just need to make them)
Bolillos (bean sandwiches, an obvious use of the previous ingredient)
Tortilla Ball soup (kind of like matzo ball soup, and a way to use the remaining tortilla's from recipe #1)

Mistakes

1) Buying a piece of produce - in my case 2 mangoes - when you know that they are waaay out of season and not even kind of ripe just because a recipe calls for it. It will not be good. Fortunately for me, the recipe called for cooking the mango in sugar and vinegar, so it was so broken down you can't tell. But I know in my heart of hearts that if those mangoes were ripe, the chutney would be better. Infinitely better.

2) Using the broiler when you do not know how to turn off your fire alarms. Again, this time, I was fortunate. A kind soul who lives upstairs came to show me how to turn them off. But this is probably the 15th time that I've set my alarms off since I moved into the apartment in September, and I've now just learned. Thank you Mitch!

The recipe I made was Curried Pork Tenderloin with Chutney and Arugala from How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman, and it will be delicious for lunch the week. I highly recommend it. Pictures of food will come later. :)