« January 2007 | Main | October 2007 »

August 29, 2007

a great brown pile of tasty on top of rice

I like chicken liver. Most (white) people I know think it's kinda gross, but i just love the velvety texture and the rich iron-y flavor. Mmm... (Hey, I tend towards anaemia.) Most Thai people seem to agree with me, because chicken liver here costs about as much as chicken breast, as far as I can tell. It's not a throwaway meat.

So my cousin mentioned a tasty dish involving chicken liver. It's a lot like something my mom used to make with pork or chicken and slivers of black mushrooms, so rest assured that if you don't like liver you can put something else in. But the liver made this childhood favorite a new and intersting experience for me. No one ever gave me a recipe, so I am guessing based on how I remember it tasting and the kinds of ingredients that I know my mom likes to keep around the kitchen.

Ingredients:

• half a medium onion (I think shallots would also do nicely)
  
• three cloves of garlic
  
• three thai chiles (on a five-star spiciness scale, this will give you about a two. There's room for more.)
  
• a chunk of ginger (like, maybe 1.5 inches cubed)
  
• a fistful of thai basil (the kind with purple stems)
  
• one chicken breast
  
• 3-4 chicken livers
  
• a splash of oyster sauce
  
• one teaspoon of that salty preserved soybeans in a jar stuff that you can totally find at asian grocery stores. (unless you're in asia, then you just find it at the grocery store.)

Toss some vegetable oil in a hot wok. The heat should be medium-high, or at least, my gas stove really only does high, medium-high, and off, so I work with that. While that's getting a het up, cut up the garlic very fine, and the onion into slices. Cut the peppers into thin, oblique slices, with that nice diagonal angle. They look pretty that way. And you can pick them out if you want in those bigger pieces. Throw that in, stir, and start cutting up the meat and liver. Toss that in and stir around.

Then you want to get very fine julienned slivers of ginger. Toss in that oyster sauce and soybean stuff, then the ginger. Stir things around for a couple minutes. At this point, if you turned on the rice cooker right before you got started, the rice should be nearly ready.

Turn off the heat. Toss in that handful of basil and stir it around till it's a bit wilted. You will have a pile of brown food that doesn't look like much, but tastes damn good.

Adding green bean or black mushrooms (you know? the kind that's kinda floppy till you bite down and then they're crunchy? I'm not sure if I'm calling them by the correct name.) Don't eat this too much, or you'll catch the gout.

Posted by amanda at 10:25 PM | TrackBack