There are several reasons why this is true, I suppose. Part of it may be the legacy of my talented and thrifty mom, who knew how to feed a family of six kids on a freelance graphic designer's (and later, a schoolteacher's) salary. Part of it may come from moral and aesthetic concerns -- a deep-rooted sense that it's wrong to throw away food, especially food derived from animals. In any case, the DON'T WASTE FOOD motto runs thick in my very veins. (You can probably imagine the feeling of sick horror that came over me last year when I discovered our chest freezer had quietly died and several hundred dollars worth of frozen meat, poultry and fish had subsequently gone bad. We shall not speak of this incident again.)
And so on to this evening. Time to roast a chicken. I was merrily pulling chicken guts out of the cavity and came across a big, beautiful, silky-looking chicken liver. Now I'm not a big fan of liver in general; I can eat it, but that doesn't mean I seek it out. Pâté, on the other hand... now that's good stuff. This liver seemed to me to be an excellent candidate for a pâté. I seasoned up the chicken, put it into the oven and went hunting for a good pâté recipe online. After finding one where I had almost all the ingredients on hand, I scaled it down to handle 2 oz. of chicken liver rather than half a pound, and proceeded to do my thang.
Several hours (and a helping of roast chicken, stir-fried choy sum, homemade applesauce and pineapple juice) later, there's a lovely rich cup of liver pâté sitting in the fridge. I just gave it a trial run on some Rykrisp. Oh MAN is it good.
Yes, I could have just thrown it away. But that would have been wrong. So, so very wrong. Mmmmm.By the way, the leftover roast chicken will be made into at least one more meal. Can't waste it, right?
6 comments:
Absolutely! I cannot abide food waste, though at least it can usually go on the compost heap, so it still serves a purpose. I would love to try your recipe but over here, for mindless health and safety issues, chickens are not allowed to be sold with giblets, though bizarrely ducks (and I think turkeys) are.
I didn't know that. Hmm, I wonder why the Powers That Be think chicken guts are a danger.
Around here chickens usually come with at least a neck (good for soup) and liver in the cavity, and some come with heart and gizzards as well... it seems to be left up to each farm to decide what goes in.
Miss V thinks this is by far the most horrible part of prepping a chicken for roasting. She is, shall we say, overly squeamish about such things. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see her go vegetarian at some point.
I found a head of dead lettuce in the bottom of the fridge this morning... boy did I get a chewing out....from me! :(
There are few things worse than giving oneself a verbal tongue-lashing. ;)
I have a problem with leftovers. I rarely through them our or let them go bad... I make sure they get eaten. .. even if I have to eat them all myself!
I think it's all part of being good stewards over what has been given to us and being conscious of our consumption.
We don't have too much trouble with leftovers around here. Captain Midnight prefers them over sandwiches and usually takes them to work as lunch. But though I try to be careful, we have had the occasional Tupperware That Time Forgot showing up in the back of the fridge... you know the kind, where you're not sure whether to just toss the whole container or let it continue its evolutionary process into a new lifeform. Ulp.
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