Chicken Liver Pate: Better Late Than Never

After a long break (I’m SO busy at the moment dahlings, you have NO idea), I’ve finally found the time to grace your screens with another foodie ramble, this time to do with chicken liver paté. Hope you all enjoy it, and don’t eat it all at once.

Without a doubt, chicken liver paté is one of my absolute favourite things. It’s my go-to starter on a disappointing restaurant menu – in fact, I have to get pretty strict with myself sometimes about giving the other dishes a shot. Making a really smooth chicken liver paté is a bit of a fine art to be honest, but if you’re just looking for something really, really tasty, look no further than the recipe below.

In terms of my usual pre-recipe burble, there are just a couple of things to say really. The difference between a paté and a parfait (since I’m sure you were wondering) is that for a paté you cook the chicken livers in butter first, then purée them, whereas for a parfait you pureé the livers first to make a sort of raw liver mush (mmmm, delicious), then pass it through a sieve before cooking it in a bain marie until it sets. This allows you to get a smoother texture because the sieve takes out any impurities. On the other hand, sautéing the livers in butter first gives a richer flavour, like when you seal beef for a stew. You can put paté through a sieve once it’s cooked and puréed and it does give a smoother texture, but when I’m just making it at home I’m afraid I see it as a bit too much of an effort.

The recipe below is based on one which my mum uses, ergo it’s tried and tested to the max. The jelly on top, though, is all mine, and I’m quite proud of it to be honest. It’s a flavoursome alternative to covering the paté with a layer of melted butter: it’s important to cover it with something, because the liver mixture will oxidise when exposed to the air. I so often hate those jellies they put on supermarket patés that I thought it was about time I worked out one I actually like. I have to say, though, that I’m not sure how much of the liking is due to the fact that it’s made of about 90% port...

Anyway, as a recipe for paté this is about as simple as it gets (don’t be fooled by the length of my method – as usual, I was a tiny bit carried away by letting you know exactly how I like to do it!). If you want to change it up a bit, you can try altering the herbs you use or leaving out the garlic. A great option is to vary the alcohol you put in the paté – Madeira is lovely with chicken liver, or you could use cognac or port.

In retrospect, there were more than a couple of things to say in the pre-recipe burble. Apologies. On with the recipe without further ado.

Ingredients

500g chicken livers

25g butter

1 onion, or two large shallots, thinly sliced

3 cloves garlic, crushed

Chopped thyme, parsley and chives – about 2 tbsp in total

100ml brandy

200ml port

1 heaped tbsp redcurrant jelly

2 leaves gelatine

Some cold water

Method

Trim any excess fat or sinew from the chicken livers. Sauté them in a little hot oil until the outsides are browned and caramelised and they’re still a bit pink inside. Season lightly and remove from the pan.

Add the butter to the same pan and when it’s foaming sweat the onions and garlic over a low heat until the onions are soft and translucent. Turn up the heat and deglaze the pan with the brandy, then reduce until almost all the brandy is gone. Return the livers briefly to the pan and leave to cool for a few moments.

In a food processor or blender, blitz the liver mixture until it’s as smooth as possible. Season to taste and transfer to the dish of your choice (NB: you can put it through a sieve at this stage if you like – it’s a bit of extra effort, but it is worth it if you don’t like it too coarse) Smooth it down with a spoon, making sure there are no air bubbles and the surface is very even. Pop it in the fridge while you make the jelly.

Put the port in a small pan and bring to a boil. Simmer until it is reduced by half – you should only have 100ml left! Put the gelatine in some cold water and let it soak for a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, whisk some redcurrant jelly into the hot port. It should all dissolve. When the couple minutes are up, squeeze the excess water out of the gelatine (it should have softened up a lot) and whisk it into the port mixture. Do not return to the heat.

Leave the port mix to cool – it shouldn’t feel at all warm to the touch. You can speed this up by putting it in the fridge, but keep a close eye on it because the jelly might start to set. If this does happen you can re-melt it with no ill effects, but don’t let it boil or you will ruin the set from the gelatine.

The mixture will thicken a bit and you may need to stir it occasionally. When it’s cooled, pour it over the paté, making sure you get a good layer over all of it. You may not need all the jelly mixture – it depends on the size of your paté dish.

Top the lot with a couple of sprigs of thyme or a bay leaf, and put it in the fridge to cool for a few hours or until the jelly has set. Use within a few days and keep it in the fridge. It’s extra great with brioche and some decent butter, or really thin (dare we say melba?) toast. 

Homemade Chicken Stock Cubes

 

I had a lovely roast chicken recently and, like any conscientious cook, I wanted to make stock from the leftovers. But there’s nothing more annoying than a freezer full of huge bags of stock that you'll never manage to use, especially if you just want a little bit and you end up having to defrost an entire ocean! So I used this clever trick to save myself some freezer space and a lot of hassle. Chicken stock might not sound like the most exciting of recipes, but I can promise you that from now on, you’ll be using this trick every time you roast a chicken. 

Essentially, once the stock is ready you remove the flavourings and reduce it to a strongly flavoured syrup, then freeze it in an ice cube mould. When you need some, you just pop a cube into boiling water, and you’ve got instant stock. It’s the same principle used in making industrial stock cubes, except that they dehydrate the original stock rather than reducing it, so that it forms a dry powder rather than a syrup, and can be pressed into cubes to be kept in your cupboard. And, of course, they put a lot more artificial flavours and colours into their mixture, whereas yours will be completely homemade; nothing will go into it that you didn’t put there yourself.

I’ve included the basic method for making stock below, as well as a more detailed explanation of the reduction and freezing. If you have your own favourite method, or flavourings you like to add which I haven’t included, just change the recipe to suit you. The reduction and freezing method works for other chicken, fish and veal stocks too. 

I’ve browned the chicken bones in this recipe, because I prefer the taste. This is technically known as a brown chicken stock; if you want to use the stock in light chicken, fish or vegetable dishes, you might prefer to make a white chicken stock, which uses the same method but without roasting the bones. White chicken stock tastes lighter and a little less rich.

Enough chatter now, and on to a recipe. 

Chicken stock cubes

Ingredients

1 chicken carcass, meat removed

1 carrot

1 onion

1 celery stem

10 black peppercorns

Bay leaf

Sprig of thyme

A parsley stem

Water

Method

Put the bones in the oven at 180° for around 10 or 15 minutes, or until they begin to brown up a bit.

Peel and roughly chop the carrot and onion, and wash and roughly chop the celery. Tie the herbs together with a piece of white, natural fibre string.

Pop the chicken in a large pan with all the vegetables, herbs and peppercorns. Cover with water so it comes to about 1-2cm over the highest point of the chicken.

Bring the pan to the boil. As it heats up you’ll need a bowl of cold water and a spoon. Scum and fat will rise to the surface as the liquid comes to the boil; carefully skim all of this off with the spoon, cleaning it in the cold water if necessary.

Once the liquid is boiling and there is no more scum rising, turn the heat down to a gentle simmer and allow to bubble quietly away for around 2 hours, and not more than three.

Once the stock is ready (give it a taste if you’re not sure – if you don’t think the flavour is strong enough, you can leave it to simmer a bit longer), drain out all the veg and chicken. RESERVE THE REMAINING LIQUID – you wouldn’t believe the number of times I’ve poured perfectly good stock down the sink!

Return the liquid to the pan and put it back on the heat. Bring it to a gentle boil and reduce it by about ¾ (reducing, for anyone who doesn’t know, is when you boil a liquid until the water starts to boil away and it reduces in volume).

This is a bit of a subjective bit. You need to taste your reduced mixture, and it should taste too strong – imagine the taste you want in your stock, and reduce the mixture until it is 3-4 times stronger than that. 

When you’ve reached your desired strength, pour the mixture into an ice cube mould and pop it in the freezer.

Finally, when you want some stock just pop out a couple of cubes and stir into some boiling water – use about 300-400ml per cube, or just taste it and bring it to the strength you want.

I do hope you get a lot of use out of this recipe, it really is a keeper. Enjoy!

'One-Tray' Chicken and Potatoes

A fairly quick roast chicken number which I knocked together for supper last night. It's pretty simple, but turns out delicious with gravy and some fresh vegetables, or even just frozen peas if you're feeling lazy. The secret is the lemon - I always include a lemon with my roast potatoes, it does something mysterious and delicious to them which I may not understand, but still can't get enough of. Lemon goes fantastically with a roasting chicken as well. In addition, putting chicken and potatoes in the same tray lets the roasties absorb some of the chicken's flavour while they cook, which makes for extra-delicious potatoes.

Straight on to the recipe today - there's not a lot of extra chatter needed about roasting a chicken I think.


Ingredients
(for 3-4)

One large whole chicken
Five medium-sized potatoes suitable for roasting - King Edwards and Maris Pipers both roast well and are easy to get your hands on
Whole head of garlic
Big handful of whole fresh rosemary stems (don't use dried, just leave it out if you can't get a hold of it)
A whole lemon, fairly large
Knob of butter
Generous splash of olive oil

Method

First off, peel your potatoes and chop to the size you like your roasties. I make mine slightly smaller than instinct tells me, as they're more likely to get nice and crispy in the chicken's cooking time.

Splash some olive oil into a large roasting tin, arrange the rosemary in the centre and make sure it's coated in oil, then settle the chicken on top of the rosemary. Scatter the potatoes around the edges of the tray. Chop the garlic head in half, then break off the individual half-cloves and scatter them over and around the potatoes and chicken. rub a couple over the chicken, and if you like stuff a few into its cavity. Separate your knob of butter into three pieces - one for the cavity of the chicken, and two to balance on or rub over its back. Finally, chop the lemon in half, then half again, and squeeze each quarter over the potatoes and chicken. Drop the squeezed-out rind into each corner of the tray. Now pop the whole thing into a medium oven, around 180 C.


That's the hard part over - all you need to do now is to wait for it all to cook. This will take at least an hour, probably more, and even up to two depending on the size of your chicken and the strength of your oven. Keep checking it regularly, and if the chicken's not browning properly you can turn up the oven to high for ten minutes to get it going. 


It's obviously important to cook your chicken through, to avoid infections like salmonella which are present in raw chicken. To check, stick a knife or skewer into the thickest part of the bird. If the juice which comes out is clear, rather than pink, it's cooked through. You'll be able to see if the meat isn't done when you carve the bird anyway - it should be opaque and a fairly pure white colour - if it's pale pink or at all translucent, you might consider giving it another few minutes in the oven. It gets easier to tell as you become more experienced.


When your chicken is finally done, the potatoes will probably still need a while to finish cooking. This is fine - lift out the chicken from the tray, pop it in a serving dish, cover with some tinfoil and leave in a warm place to rest. All meat needs 'resting' after cooking - it basically means keeping the meat warm but leaving it for a while before eating, which allows the proteins in the meat to relax and distributes the juices more evenly, leading to a juicier and more tender mouthful when you come to eat.


When you remove the chicken, give the pan a good shake to agitate the potatoes and mix the rosemary in more evenly. If you're making gravy, you'll also want to carefully tip the juices from the meat into a separate container for use in a sec, and sprinkle a bit more olive oil over the potatoes to make up for the lost fat.


While the potatoes are finishing off, in a hotter oven if they have a long way to go, you can cook your vegetables - frozen peas are quick, and broccoli is supposed to protect against some forms of cancer, so they'd be my choice. You can also make the gravy. Once the potatoes are done, you're ready to eat. Enjoy a nice roast dinner once in a while!


Finally: GRAVY for this chicken dish

My standard gravy for a chicken roast goes as follows: 

Either skim the fat off the chicken juices, or use one of those clever little separating jugs like this one to get to the good bits of dripping and discard the bad. Put the good bits (the liquid that sinks to the bottom when you leave the juice to sit for 5 minutes, while the fat sits on top) into a saucepan, add a tablespoon of flour, and stir vigorously with a whisk over a low heat until it's all combined. Then pour in about a pint of chicken stock (homemade is best, of course, but Knorr stock cubes are a good substitute if you've run out), whisking all the time. Add a glass of red wine, and leave to simmer gently for five minutes. Taste and season. You can add a spoonful of redcurrant jelly if you like a sweeter sauce, but otherwise that's it. Not too hard, and way better than Bisto!
 

Creamy Chicken Pasta with Caramelised Onions

First, an apology. I've dropped the ball. There has, I admit, not been a post for...yes, it might be three days. This is because I've managed to escape the grim northern wastes for a while (getting out hours before the snow closed the roads completely...) to stay with the Boyfriend, where there have been interesting things to do which have distracted me from blogging. Enough said, I think.

In addition, I will be gallivanting off for some skiing in France this week, hammering the last nail into the blackened coffin that is my overdraft, so there will be a week-long hiatus from tomorrow until next weekend. My sincere apologies to my dedicated followers. As a reward, though, for your patience, I'll write an extra-long superblog next week and tell you all about the cheap and cheerful ways I attempted to feed myself in snowy Europe, as opposed to snowy Northumberland. So at least you've all got something to look forward to.

And so to recipes. This week, I've been attempting to teach the Boyfriend to cook - and to be fair to him, he's not doing badly. His enthusiasm reminds me of me, back when I first learned to cook pasta! We made ourselves supper one night this week, nothing too sophisticated but just a bit yummy nevertheless.

A bit of a note on shopping - I've found that student shopping always ends up more expensive than you'd expect, even if you're trying to save. My theory on this is that a lot of students end up having to buy things like flour, spices, tinned tomatoes, pasta and so on which the average family house might expect to have in their store-cupboard. If you're a student or trying to save money, I'd remind you that dry goods keep for a long time in your cupboard, so if you do a big 'store' shop at the beginning of the term or the year, you might end up saving more in the long run, especially if you try to pick your recipes based on what you've got in your cupboard.

Also on shopping - I had to look around a bit, but eventually I did find some free-range chicken breasts, which worked out about a pound more expensive than the battery ones. To my mind, it's really worth the money, because if you're going to kill and eat a chicken you ought at least to make sure the bird has had a decent life first. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has done a lot in this direction. Of course, if you can't afford it, you can't afford it, but you might want to have a bit of a think about where you stand.

Boyfriend and I used chicken breasts with the skin on and pan-fried them (the skin keeps them moist and stops them from burning before they're cooked through). We ate them whole, but after eating our supper we decided the dish might be nicer if you chopped the chicken fairly small, cooked it off, and mixed it with the pasta just before eating.

It was utterly delicious, though, and simple as anything to prepare. We sliced an onion and popped it in a pan with butter and olive oil on a low heat, along with a couple of sprigs of rosemary and some chopped garlic. Let it sweat for quite a while, until it's really soft and caramel-y, then we whacked in some marsala or balsamic vinegar and reduce the mixture down until it caramelises fully. At the same time we cooked off the chicken and boiled some pasta and green beans in the same pan (saves on washing up!)

Finally, we deglazed the chicken pan by pouring in some marsala and scraping away at the delicious sticky bits on the bottom of the pan. These are absolutely the best bits and their flavour should never be wasted! We combined the reduced marsala and onions (take out the rosemary sprigs first) with cream and the chicken juices, poured that over the drained pasta and beans, and ate with the fried chicken. Very creamy, totally dreamy.

Here's the recipe, which is based on one from Nigel Slater's Real Cooking:

Ingredients (for two):

2 chicken breasts
Some green beans
A few handfuls of pasta
Olive oil
Butter
An onion
Some Marsala, Madeira, or Balsamic vinegar
Some garlic cloves
A bit of rosemary


Method:

1. Chop the onions and garlic and sweat in a pan with butter, olive oil and rosemary until very, very soft. This may take a while. At the same time, fry the chicken (either chopped or whole, your choice) in some olive oil.
2. Ten minutes before the chicken is done, pour some Marsala over the onions (turn up the heat a bit, as well) and put the pasta and chopped green beans in boiling water.
3. When the chicken is done, deglaze the pan by pouring over some Marsala and scraping at the sticky bits over a high heat, then add this to the onions. Remove the rosemary from the onions
4. Let the alcohol boil off, then add some cream.
5. Drain the pasta when it's done, then add it to the sauce and mix well.
6. Either stir in the chicken or serve it with the pasta to the side.
7. Enjoy.

Austerity Pie

Another leftover-related recipe today, and also what you might call A Pie For Our Times. I was handed some leftover chicken this morning by an Anonymous Bystander and told to make a pie. Mmmmmmm, Chicken Pie, thinks I. Leftover No. 1 was born.

Nos. 2 and 3 were the peas which my Dad didn't eat for his lunch, and the puff pastry which didn't go into Saturday's Tarte Tatin. Add them together, and what do you get? Credit crunch heaven, plus a handy excuse to avoid driving through 9 inches of snow for groceries. Isn't winter Fun.

I actually just winged it today and didn't use a particular recipe, so I'll stick my rough method at the bottom of this post. Where I have used copyrighted recipes in the blog, I've just posted a link where you can find out more, rather than plagiarising. Hooray. If anyone's interested in trying to reproduce and/or improve my recipe, go ahead.

Essentially, cooked chicken, plus some vegetables (I chose peas and leeks, pretty much because they were what needed using up), plus a sauce, plus pastry makes...PIE.

My chicken was cooked already  - the end of Saturday night's roast. All I had to do, then, was sweat some leeks in butter, boil some peas for my Dad's lunch and wait for him not to eat them all, and whip up a killer sauce. Now, my sauces tend to be a tiny, tiny bit hit-and-miss. Since to me the keystone of a good pie is the sauce, I was slightly on my guard - but this time everything went to plan beautifully.

I put together a roux (melt butter, add flour, for any beginners out there!), and added about a litre of chicken stock, whisking the mixture the whole time. Well, probably a litre of chicken stock. To be honest, I poured it in from a jug until it looked the right consistency - smooth, but not watery - and didn't bother with the measurements. I chucked in the end of a bottle of white wine too. Another leftover. This pie is drawing them in like a thrifty little magnet.

The sauce at this stage was nice enough, but a bit bland and boring, so for flavour I added cream and some dijon mustard. Leeks love cream, and chicken and dijon is a match made in heaven, so I was hoping the combination would be a winner. Some seasoning with salt and ground black pepper, and a final quick reduction to boil off the alcohol from the white wine, and voila! Austerity Sauce.

Could I possibly be taking the recession-inspired name thing just a touch too far?  Hmmm.

In fact, this is the only part of the pie which isn't austere, since cream, mustard and wine are all fairly pricey, but it did taste brilliant.

Final stages are easy as pie (oh dear). Leeks, peas and chicken in sauce. Sauce in pie dish. Roll out pastry (which, by the way, I had carefully stored all neatly folded up because it's puff pastry from the Tartes and needs to be folded, rather than just rolled into a squishy ball, to preserve the buttery layers which make it puff up in the oven). Pastry over pie. Optional decorative leaves, berries and so forth cut out from spare pastry, which I always do because it's like being back at primary school. Brush pie with egg. Pie in hot oven for 15-20 minutes. Pie out. Eat at will. So far I've held out, but it LOOKS good...


Recipe for Austerity Pie
A.K.A Chicken, Leek and Pea Pie, if you must.

Ingredients:

Cooked chicken, torn into bitesize pieces
2 small leeks
A handful of peas (frozen are fine)
Any other miscellaneous vegetables you feel like adding, or switching with one of the above
Knob of butter
Flour
About 1 litre of chicken stock
White wine (a glass or so)
1 tsp of mustard
A glug of cream
Salt and pepper
Puff pastry (you can buy this at the supermarket, and it's just as good as homemade. Honest.)

Method:

1. Sweat the leeks in some butter until they are soft, and boil the peas for a couple of minutes until cooked. Pre-heat your oven to around 200 (gas mark 6 or 7 I think).
2. Melt some butter in a saucepan and add a couple of shakes from your bag of flour. Combine and allow to cook for a minute or so. It should be thick but not insanely thick. Use your commonsense. This is a roux. It should smell a bit nutty but not be brown, just light gold.
3. Whisking constantly, add the wine and then the chicken stock to your roux, until the consistency is what you'd imagine having in your ideal pie, or a tiny bit runnier.
4. Whisk in the mustard and the cream, and season with the salt and pepper.
5. Tasting on the way, let the sauce simmer until the ingredients are all well combined, the alcoholic taste from the wine has vanished, and the sauce is the right consistency for you. You can add some water to thin it out a bit if necessary.
6. Mix all the filling together, and put in an ovenproof dish. Roll out the pastry (if you need to, you can get it ready-rolled) and cover the filling with it. Leave a generous amount around the edges, because the pastry will shrink a bit as it cooks.
7. Playtime. Make leaves, berries, flowers, smiley faces, or inappropriate bodily parts out of any spare pastry to decorate your pie. Stick these to the top with some beaten egg, otherwise they won't stay put when they start to cook.
8. Brush the whole pastry top, including any decoration, with beaten egg. If you don't have a pastry brush, it can be done with your fingers. I know, because I have - aah, remember those student days.
9. In the pre-heated oven with it, for 15-20 minutes. Keep an eye and don't let the pastry burn. It should be a lovely golden-y brown.
10. Eat your pie. You deserve it.