#I actually like the aspic on top but idk if I’ll make some

[ellynneversweet]

How to make pâté.

1. Start where all such endeavours start — as an enthusiastic eater and indifferent cook, disgruntled at the cost of some particular item or other. In this case, pâté. The good stuff is expensive, even on sale, but the budget liverwurst in the lunch meat section looks uncannily like dog food. There is seemingly no in-between.

2. Notice that the butchers has a slimy, amorphous pile labelled chicken livers, by far the cheapest meat on sale. Remember that pâté is made of liver and wonder why it’s so expensive. Maybe the recipe’s complicated? Buy something you know how to cook, instead.

3. Google pâté recipes, and discover that it’s basically butter and liver, with a few flavourings, fried and blended into a paste. Find a recipe that includes orange zest — your preferred pate, when it’s on sale, has orange in it.

4. Next time you’re at the greengrocers, buy an orange. Don’t bother with onions and garlic — there’s always some in the kitchen. It’s amazing how many onions there are in the kitchen.

5. Go next door to the butchers, ask confidently for chicken livers, having checked your recipe to be sure how much to ask for. Unfortunately, today of all days, they don’t have any. Leave, despondent, with your orange.

6. Go to the supermarket (you were going anyway). Notice, in the crowded meat section, some weirdly dark meat tucked in the corner of the poultry section. Liver! You can’t remember how much you need, and everyone in the store seems to want to be exactly where you are. You can’t find the tab with the recipe you had open. Try not to overhear the conversation of the couple standing by the kebabs. You start to worry that you look like the sort of person who doesn’t know what to do with liver, but is buying it anyway. In a rush, pick up two containers — six dollars worth of liver. That’s about as cheap as pâté on sale gets, surely that’s enough?

7. Get distracted. A day and a half later, remember the liver in the fridge. Panic. How long does offal last, anyway? You’d better cook it all tonight.

8. Spend a fruitless half hour looking for cointreau — you know you had a bottle and it’s only for cooking, how can it have been used up? Give up and settle for some brandy that’s gone all dusty behind the rum and tequila.

9. Pull out the containers of liver.

10. Find the recipe. Realise that it calls for just 250g, and you have somehow bought a whole kilo of liver. Do some quick maths — there won’t be as much orange zest, but you can add some extra juice. Guesstimate four small white onions into two huge Spanish onions. Crush some garlic. Cry, because you’re wearing glasses and you’re used to the protective effect of contact lenses when chopping onions.

11. Realise your phone is about to die, plug it in on the other side of the room.

12. Open the containers, smell the livers. They seem fine, although the smell of chopped onions is so strong you have to get in close. Pick them out one by one — you need to cut the tendony bits off. You’re not sure what you expected chicken livers to look like, individually. They’re bigger than you expected, but not as gross or as slippery as you thought.

13. Find some butter. There’s not enough in the fridge, but there should be some in the freezer. Hack 400g of butter off the frozen brick with a clean knife. It’s a LOT of butter. You feel mildly worried, but put in the frying pan to melt.

14. Cook the onions, garlic and zest in what is basically a bath of butter. Resist the temptation to turn the heat up to a roaring boil.

15. Retrieve your phone — you need to time this, and your patience for slow cooking onions is seriously limited. Check the time. Go on tumblr. Check the recipe again. Tumblr, again. Realise it’s now a minute past the time you were waiting for.

16. You need to remove the onions with a slotted spoon. Retrieve about 70% and give up on the rest. Surely they won’t burn — they’re not even touching the bottom of the pan.

17. Realise that your suspicion that all the liver you have won’t fit in the pan was correct. Divide it in half, watching the time like a hawk. Worry that they’re meant to be frying on the base of the pan, rather than simmering in butter. Resist the temptation to leave them longer, since the usual concern when cooking chicken doesn’t apply here — they’re still meant to be pink on the inside. Wonder why people complain about how bad cooking liver smells. It’s not that strong.

18. Check the recipe — how long do you need to let this rest? Realise you’re meant to boil the brandy into the butter, and turn the heat back on. Eyeball the brandy, glug glug.

19. Find the blender. You need to let it cool, but presumably not so long that the butter in the pan turns back into a solid, so the time taken to find all the bits of the blender and assemble them is probably enough.

20. Put half the ingredients in the blender, awkwardly ladling liquid butter out of the pan. Realise, about this time, that the recipe called for half of the butter to go in the pan, and the other to be held back until you get to the blending bit.

21. Put the lid on, check the seal, pray you’re not about to be sprayed with hot butter.

22. Blend.

23. Open the lid. It smells...pungent. Definitely a pâté smell, but, uh, warm. It’s liquidy, which you didn’t expect. The last time you tried something like this was making marzipan, which has the consistency of play dough even when fresh.

24. Pour the pâté into a bowl, and add the rest of the ingredients into the blender. There’s more butter this time, because you abandon the ladle in favour of picking up the pan and pouring. Blend, again.

25. This is meat soup.

26. Pour it into the bowl with the first lot of pâté. Realise too late that the bowl is too small, and spill what would be a whole serving of store pâté on the counter. Transfer to another (bigger) bowl and stir.

27. Offer the dog, who has been watching in astonishment, a taste off your finger. He sniffs it, declines, and licks your clean thumb instead. He’s a fussy eater, though, so you ignore his opinion.

28. Taste test — it tastes right, even if it needs to set.

29. Consider your enormous bowl of pâté. Is this too much? Possibly. You’ll have to bribe other people with it. Put it in the fridge.

30. Go to the bathroom at the other end of the house. Come out, realise your whole house smells like pâté. Realise the liver smell really is that strong, and, like a Lush employee, your nose had simply turned off.

31. Enjoy???

#adventures in offal #I actually like the aspic on top but idk if I’ll make some