It's Fight Back Friday over at Food Renegade. Here's my contribution:
One of the yummy things that we've started eating in the past couple of months is organ meats. So far we have been able to find two types of organ meats that some of our family enjoys: Grass fed beef liver, and Scrapple.
The grass fed beef liver was a surprise to me. I'd read how very nutritious it is, and when I saw on my farmer's price list, how very cheap the liver was, I ordered a couple of packets. I made my first batch with fear and trepidation, childhood memories of bitter, gall tasting liver haunting me.
Oh. My. Goodness.
Grass-fed liver is good! Mild, and almost sweet-tasting.
Here's how I cook it:
Rinse thawed liver well. Cut into strips. Dredge in salt and pepper seasoned unbleached flour. Pan-fry in skillet using lard.
I like to serve this with rice, and a nice crisp salad. Gravy seems a bit too nineteenth century for us, although once the liver is cooked, the pan is begging for me to make gravy out of the rest of the flour. I could see if we were doing hard labor, I'd be very interested in adding those extra calories to the meal. But we aren't, so I don't. Liver is a once-a-week staple now. The two youngest kids don't like it, as I did not like liver, either, when I was their age. Maybe someday they will be blogging about their own liver one-eighty.
The other delicious organ meat discovery we have made is scrapple. I found a packet of scrapple at Whole Foods, and the label looked pretty good, no ugly ingredients, humanely treated pigs, etc. Of course there's a level of trust necessary that the company (I don't currently have a package of scrapple to say what brand it was) is truly using the nice farming practices that they claim, but I decided to try the scrapple.
I was pleased. Scrapple makes a great breakfast meat, and we fried it up for a Saturday morning breakfast addition. At first I tried cooking it in slices (I did not add any more oil or fat to the pan, it has plenty of that on it's own), but the slices fell apart, and so I did a scrapple scramble instead. Scrapple tastes a little bit like bologna.
And here's a nice quote from Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon, page 299:
"Almost all traditional cultures prize organ meats for their ability to build reserves of strength and vitality. Organ meats are extremely rich in fat-soluble vitamins A and D, as well as essential fatty acids, important very-long-chain superunsaturated fatty acids and the whole gamut of macro and trace minerals."
One of the yummy things that we've started eating in the past couple of months is organ meats. So far we have been able to find two types of organ meats that some of our family enjoys: Grass fed beef liver, and Scrapple.
The grass fed beef liver was a surprise to me. I'd read how very nutritious it is, and when I saw on my farmer's price list, how very cheap the liver was, I ordered a couple of packets. I made my first batch with fear and trepidation, childhood memories of bitter, gall tasting liver haunting me.
Oh. My. Goodness.
Grass-fed liver is good! Mild, and almost sweet-tasting.
Here's how I cook it:
Rinse thawed liver well. Cut into strips. Dredge in salt and pepper seasoned unbleached flour. Pan-fry in skillet using lard.
I like to serve this with rice, and a nice crisp salad. Gravy seems a bit too nineteenth century for us, although once the liver is cooked, the pan is begging for me to make gravy out of the rest of the flour. I could see if we were doing hard labor, I'd be very interested in adding those extra calories to the meal. But we aren't, so I don't. Liver is a once-a-week staple now. The two youngest kids don't like it, as I did not like liver, either, when I was their age. Maybe someday they will be blogging about their own liver one-eighty.
The other delicious organ meat discovery we have made is scrapple. I found a packet of scrapple at Whole Foods, and the label looked pretty good, no ugly ingredients, humanely treated pigs, etc. Of course there's a level of trust necessary that the company (I don't currently have a package of scrapple to say what brand it was) is truly using the nice farming practices that they claim, but I decided to try the scrapple.
I was pleased. Scrapple makes a great breakfast meat, and we fried it up for a Saturday morning breakfast addition. At first I tried cooking it in slices (I did not add any more oil or fat to the pan, it has plenty of that on it's own), but the slices fell apart, and so I did a scrapple scramble instead. Scrapple tastes a little bit like bologna.
And here's a nice quote from Nourishing Traditions, by Sally Fallon, page 299:
"Almost all traditional cultures prize organ meats for their ability to build reserves of strength and vitality. Organ meats are extremely rich in fat-soluble vitamins A and D, as well as essential fatty acids, important very-long-chain superunsaturated fatty acids and the whole gamut of macro and trace minerals."
Comments
Thanks for sharing this in Fight Back Fridays today.
Cheers,
~KristenM
AKA FoodRenegade