I am a firm believer that if you are going to be a meat eater, you should do your best to make use of all the bits of every animal. We do often buy meat in the form of a ‘half sheep’ or a ‘quarter pig’ and this means I use some of the less usual cuts, such as pork hock or neck of mutton, which rarely appear on supermarket shelves. Often these cuts are the ones that contain lots of connective tissue, so are tough unless cooked long and slow – something that I don’t mind doing at all, especially since they are frequently very tasty. However, I’m not a very big fan of offal, so I do struggle to put my ‘use the whole animal’ belief into practice. Nevertheless, last time we bought a box of pork from the amazing Martha Roberts, I did ask for the liver and today I took the plunge and made pork liver pate – something that Mr Snail really loves.
I chose a recipe from the River Cottage Cookbook that uses liver and belly pork. Mincing the meat up was rather messy and stretching the bacon to line the tins took a bit of time, but the results looked promising when they went into the oven. I’m really hoping that this will be a success, because it can be sliced and frozen for later use, and should go a very long way.
Anyway, it’s in the oven now and hopefully we’ll have a verdict tomorrow once it’s cool.
I noticed that the recipe on the adjacent page was for pigs trotters… I might have to work myself up to trying that!