Everyday Meals: Liver and Eggs

To begin by stating the obvious, it seems as though liver and other organ meats are no longer popular choices...at least not in the circles that I frequent.  I guess that's because something like liver is a serious piece of meat.  That is, it tastes like meat, and not like some bland carrier component for the other flavors in a dish (ahem, boneless chicken breasts).  It doesn't respond well to cooking for too long.  It can be a bit more temperamental than a roast or hamburger, and it certainly doesn't stay fresh nearly as long nor does it make particularly good leftovers.

It is extremely easy to cook, though, and it cooks up very fast.  It stores well frozen, it's less expensive than most other muscular meats (even 'ground meat'), and if you take the time to look at the vitamin content of even a meager 4 ounce piece of beef liver, it might just blow your mind.  This is a serious superfood.

The trick to thinking about liver preparation, if there is in fact a trick at all, is that you really have to accept the liver as the key player...the primary ingredient.  Even a small amount added to a sauce and served over pasta will make the flavor of the sauce liver-dominant.  That's fine - liver is also delicious if prepared well and served hot. 

My favorite preparation is to simply pan-sear the liver in some butter or tallow, plate over whatever greens we happen to have handy, and top with a pasture raised egg or two.  The egg yolk provides extra healthy fats to aid in the assimilation of the fat soluble vitamins from the liver (and also adds protein and nutrients of its own). 

Everyday Meals: Soured Oats and Eggs

While we normally post the highlights of our culinary endeavors, I feel like it serves to reason that we can share the kinds of meals that we eat with regularity - dishes that we have in between the venison pot pies and the more extravagant creations such as buffalo chicken calzones and braised oxtail. 

Christa can attest that when I make food for her and for myself that I make it from scratch, but we don't always have time for elaborate meals that take 6+ hours to prepare.  There are two ways that I ensure that we always have good homemade food during the week even when we are both crunched for time:  batch cooking and quick go-to meals.

Batch cooking is very useful, because it allows me to spend the same amount of time that I might otherwise use to make 2 meals and instead prepare 8 meals.  It doesn't necessarily take any longer to increase the amount of food prepped in one recipe, and in the long run it saves time as I am only cooking for two.  By cooking a whole roast, several quarts of soup, or entire roasted chickens, we can then get many meals out of that one recipe by eating leftovers during the week and also by freezing portions for use in the future.  Freezing and storage is particularly handy as it allows for us to have a variety of meals, rather than eating the same thing all week (which can get boring no matter how good it tasted at first).  I'll get more into ways to maximize the efforts of freezing and storage of batch cooking in the future, but let's talk about the other simple way to always have fresh, real food at hand.

Quick go-to meals are more the focus of this post.  These are things that can be thrown together quickly, and often times do not benefit from longer cooking at all.  This are the kind of meals that we make for breakfast while getting packed for work; the kind of meals that we'll make on a rushed evening when there's nothing cooked in the fridge (like this week after returning from a 4-day weekend vacation).  They're also usually cheap...much cheaper than prepackaged convenient foods, and more importantly, they're health real food.

Most mornings, I put together oatmeal for Christa.  She prefers the cracked oats as opposed to the rolled, and we both prefer to sour our grains before cooking (unless they're sprouted).  Soaking the oats to sour them makes cooking much faster in the morning.  Just put them in a put or a jar, add three times as much water as oats, add a splash of raw vinegar, and leave them covered on the counter at room temperature for 1-2 days.  Put them on the stove in the morning and the soaked oats will cook up in less than 5 minutes into a creamy and exquisitely flavored porridge.  Add butter and/or maple syrup to taste, and serve them with a glass of whole creamline milk and a pair of gently cooked pastured chicken eggs for a really excellent start to the day that costs less than a "fast-food" breakfast and is infinitely more nourishing.

15 minutes of actual cook time for something that we could eat every morning

So, for those of you that are more curious about what it is that we're eating, and want a closer look at the philosophy and reasoning behind it, stay tuned for updates on everyday meals.  When we slow down enough to take a picture, we'll be sure to write about them.

Maple Butter Oatmeal

This is my favorite food right now. I have it for breakfast, as a midnight snack, and everything in between. The butter melts and combines with the maple syrup and cream into a rich, heavenly good-for-you treat. It's like pancakes in a bowl.

Once the oats are prepared (look for an upcoming post on that), it's quick and simple to make. Just stir and enjoy!


Maple Butter Oatmeal
1/2 cup cooked steel-cut oats
1-1/2 T grassfed butter
2 T grade B maple syrup
2 T grassfed cream

Combine the warm oats with the butter, maple syrup, and cream. Stir until combined.

Out on the Farm

Sourcing Groceries

Happy cows are healthy cows. 

 Let me confess something here - shopping for food is absolutely my favorite kind of shopping.  I really enjoy finding good sources of healthy foods with which to make recipes from.  While I find lots of inspiration from books and the internet, and typically make my grocery lists quite organized in advance of heading out to the store, I also revel in wandering through the produce section of Whole Foods or Wegmans and choosing my upcoming menus based on what is fresh and available at the time.  Good ingredients  tend to come together naturally, while forcing a dish together with sub-par components typically yields sub-par results.

Grocery stores, such as the aforementioned, do in fact make up the majority of my food shopping trips, especially in the winter months.  I love visiting our local farm markets in the summer and fall, and given the option I would do all of my shopping there, but the reality of the situation is that in New Jersey the produce season is limited, and we don't grow coconuts or oats (which are basically dietary staples for us) that I'm aware of.  I like that Whole Foods sources at least some of their supplies from local producers, which also creates a different shopping experience depending on whether or not I happen to be down in Princeton of up in Ridgewood.  However, yesterday I made a trip for some really fantastic local food.

Vegetables might be out of season, but my nearest source of pasture raised grassfed beef is well stocked.  Going straight to the farm is such a fantastic experience and I recommend it to anyone who can (and if you do a little legwork, you will likely find a farm or six nearby).  Not only do you get to see how your food has been raised, but you can talk to the people who have raised it, and in my experience they are friendly and knowledgeable and very happy to talk shop.  I particularly like the fact that I know how my meat was treated before it reaches my table, which gives me peace of mind on the nutritional quality as well as the quality of life that the animal experienced.  You don't need to be a vegetarian to be proactive about animal welfare.  I eat animal products daily, and I treasure them as natural sources of high quality fats, protein, and vitamins/minerals.  Additionally, the money that I spent went directly to the farmer - I didn't have to pay a mark up to any middleman, and the farmer took home 100% of the retail sale.  

January isn't a high production month in the northeast for chickens that live outside freely, but the farmer and I took a walk to the coops to see if we could find a dozen or so eggs at my request.  We found only three, which she was kind enough to give to me for free, and I also got to take a look at the coops and laying boxes that they use on a small scale operation.  This was particularly neat, as Christa and I have been giving serious consideration to keeping a few chickens ourselves for egg laying once we have the space.


I picked up about 30lbs of mixed bones, some liver, a heart, and a little bit of ground beef there.  I hope that you stick around to see what I end up making out of all of it (some if will be delicious, I promise), and I encourage you to go out and meet the farmers in your area.  They are really your best source for fresh local food, and often times the healthiest and most humanely raised as well.