I do like offal. Not only is it versatile and tasty, but often very cheap. When you raise your own animals for slaughter, you receive plenty of offal, and we very much enjoy the treat that is it.
For a start, on slaughter day, we have a first taste with a dinner of fresh liver, as we get that the same day, but the rest of the meat takes longer to come home. But liver is a food you are only supposed to eat once a week, so we have to process the rest for another day.
British food is not recognised for its charcuterie – which is a shame because we do have some cracking recipes – a good traditional sausage is something to be proud of., as are our bacon, hams, black pudding and hogs pudding.
For offal based ’sausages’ – for that’s essentially what they are.. we have haggis, and faggots. My family love haggis and we made several from the lambs’ plucks – in my mind the best way to make use of the lights and hearts and some of the liver.
We also love faggots, which is mostly pigs heart, with cereal and liver. We follow the recipe in the River Cottage meat book which I think is pretty good.
There are various traditional ways to eat kidneys – just fried, or devilled on toast, or braised with chuck steak for steak and kidney pudding.
but for something a little less close to home, we made pâté over the weekend. We froze the liver, and waited until the rest of the pork caught up with it, so we could use a little belly pork. For this recipe we went with the one from the River Cottage cookbook, with a few modifications, and I have to say its lovely. We minced it finely for a smooth texture, and the recipe using 500g of liver easily makes six family servings.
Yay for offal.
