An offal day
22 May 2022 12:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeToday I bought a pair of lamb's kidneys and a pound of pig's heart, the latter mainly because it was very cheap and I thought I could use it as a beef-substitute in the various recipes that assume that slow-cooked beef is economical. Also a piece of brawn, which was a bit of a logistical mistake due to my self-imposed rule that you don't eat meat for more than one meal per day -- I was now stuck with three short-shelf-life items (offal normally has to be cooked the same day, especially if it has been carried home in the heat).
So I ended up freezing two bags of chopped pig's-heart (apparently it tastes more like beef than pork when marinated; I had a lot of success marinating my lamb steaks, apart from the fact that if you use olive oil the marinade solidifies in the fridge!), and simultaneously advance-cooking a rassol'nik (Russian kidney and pickled cucumber soup) and khoresh karafs (Persian celery stew). The resulting aromas were incongruously assorted, but very un-English!
Of course putting pig heart instead of beef in a Persian recipe is presumably utter sacrilege...
The last time I cooked (whole lamb's) hearts was in 1994, when I tried out the recipe for Stuffed Heart in Jocasta Innes' "Pauper's Cookbook". Even after the prescribed cooking time I remember they were still so tough as to be almost inedible, and I never repeated the experiment! So this time I made sure to cook the stew *very* long and *very* slow, until the texture of the chunks had broken down to something akin to cooked liver.
The brawn is still unopened in the fridge to be broached tomorrow, and I now have multiple portions of frozen stews.
So I ended up freezing two bags of chopped pig's-heart (apparently it tastes more like beef than pork when marinated; I had a lot of success marinating my lamb steaks, apart from the fact that if you use olive oil the marinade solidifies in the fridge!), and simultaneously advance-cooking a rassol'nik (Russian kidney and pickled cucumber soup) and khoresh karafs (Persian celery stew). The resulting aromas were incongruously assorted, but very un-English!
Of course putting pig heart instead of beef in a Persian recipe is presumably utter sacrilege...
The last time I cooked (whole lamb's) hearts was in 1994, when I tried out the recipe for Stuffed Heart in Jocasta Innes' "Pauper's Cookbook". Even after the prescribed cooking time I remember they were still so tough as to be almost inedible, and I never repeated the experiment! So this time I made sure to cook the stew *very* long and *very* slow, until the texture of the chunks had broken down to something akin to cooked liver.
The brawn is still unopened in the fridge to be broached tomorrow, and I now have multiple portions of frozen stews.