Recipe of the Week: Liver & Onions

I don’t really know what made me decide to look up this recipe, but someone must have mentioned it to me. I remember having it a couple of times and liking it well enough as a child, although I remember liver being pretty tough and having a very distinct taste, one that I wasn’t sure I would still care for much as an adult. But as a chronic iron-deficient anemic, I decided that the nutritional benefits of adding a little liver to my diet might be well worth the experiment.

I found this recipe, boldly titled the Absolute Best Liver and Onions. I try to avoid handling raw meat, not because I’m squeamish but because I’m paranoid (and this was before I found out that my husband’s cousin – a healthy twenty-something – died suddenly from Salmonella poisoning after eating a burger years ago), so I wasn’t looking forward to slicing up the liver as the recipe calls for. Fortunately, it came from the market already sliced (whew!), so the only time I had to physically touch it was while rinsing it under the sink; the rest of the time I used tongs.

I followed the recipe almost to the letter, except for the salt and pepper. I seasoned it with Creole seasoning blend instead. Unlike the tough as leather liver of my youth, the end result was very very tender, almost to the point of literally melting in my mouth, and this was pretty much the recipe’s downfall. I don’t like food that is too buttery and tender: smoked and raw salmon gross me out for that very reason. It still had that very distinctive liver taste, which I don’t mind that much – but Marcus was disgusted. I ate at least enough to get my daily value of iron and then gave the rest to my mother.

Conclusion: if you like liver and if you like buttery food that melts in your mouth, then you’ll like this. If not, steer clear.

Recipe of the Week: Beets ‘n’ Sweets

For Mother’s Day weekend I decided to try a recipe that I had been eyeing for the past month. I found Roasted Beets ‘n’ Sweets on allrecipes.com (Have I mentioned how much I loooove that site? Because I do! I want to marry it!) and couldn’t wait to try it, as there were no ingredients that I don’t already harbor an unholy love for (my grammar sucks today, meh).

I love beets, but so far I’ve only had them one way: boiled plain, no extra spices of any kind. Sweet potatoes were something that I disliked for about 95% of my life but have grown to appreciate more recently, as in merely six months ago when my mom made caramelized sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving. Garlic and onions are of course old favorites; I put either of them in pretty much anything.

For my incarnation of this recipe (I don’t have any good pics, unfortunately, but there are pics on allrecipes), I replaced the garlic powder with half a head of minced fresh garlic and replaced the white sugar with brown sugar.

The end result was yummy, although some of the chunks of beets weren’t quite tender enough and I thought it could use a bit more onion and a tiny bit more salt. But it was definitely a nice meal to have on a cool, rainy day and I’ll certainly be making it again.