Fifty shades of brown

Cat and I held our second offal cooking course in the local hotel kitchen (Tallhöjden).
Heart, liver and tongue were on the menu for five excited students.

Obligatory welfie ahead of course

 We started with a bit of background information about offal:

• Offal is not just organ meat such as liver, heart, lungs, kidneys, stomach... It also includes other odd bits such as tongue, cheek, tail, feet. The kind of stuff that your grandma used to eat but you no longer find in the supermarket shelves.
• Offal is cheap! When we switched to better quality meat - primarily freerange and grassfed - we needed to widen our repertoire of cuts to keep the bills down.
• Offal is the multivitamin of the animal - liver and heart are two of the most nutritious foods you can eat. CoQ10, iron, vitamins A and B, trace minerals, to name a few...
• Throwing away large parts of the animal is no longer an option for us! It isn't just about the waste of resources, it is simply unethical to kill an animal and not use as much as possible of it. (See note on "cat jar" below - we try to make use of EVERYTHING.)

Slicing liver - note the "cat jar" for the leftovers to the right

The aim of the course was to give the participants a few simple dishes to start their journey into "offal land" with.

• Beef liver pâté with butter, onion, garlic and various spices - very creamy and delicious if we may say so ourselves! 
• Fried lamb heart, thinly sliced and marinated in garlic, ginger and chili - my favourite every time. 
• Tongue - boiled as well as fried.

We added salad to the final dish to avoid too much of a meat overload.

The tasting session last time around was a bit too heavy on the meat, so we added in a bit of salad, sauerkraut and lingonberries to break up the brown on the plates.

To wash it all down, we made our students a shot of bone broth. Beige on brown is such an attractive combination...

Mr K with a plate full of brown (tongue, liver pâté, flash fried marinated heart, served up with a glass of beige (bone broth)

We'll see if we get around to developing the next level offal course sometime later in the year. Kidneys, brain and lungs, anyone?