Leiths Week 5 – Pâté with melba toast, salmon and broccoli salad

Chicken liver pâté and melba toasts

I like liver pâté but I had never previously given much thought to its preparation. Now that I can speak from experience, I can say that ignorance is bliss and in future I will buy my rather than make pâté. Some things are best left to the specialists.

It’s not that it’s difficult to make, it’s just that I had to pick through a pile of chicken livers, removing membranes and green bits. The texture and smell made me gag. The torture wasn’t over until we had chopped the liver into chunks, rinsed them and patted them dry.

Once that was done, it got better. We’d already fried some garlic onion and left the remaining butter in the pan. Now we added the livers and fried, browning gently on all sides. Then we got to do a brandy flambé, which was very cool and almost made up for the grossness of the livers. We had flames shooting up to the ceiling and it was all okay because we were in a stainless steel industrial kitchen.

After that it was all plain sailing. We seasoned with salt and pepper and allowed to cool slightly. Then we blended the liver and onion mix in a food processor.

We made cute little melba toasts to go with it and they were definitely far superior to any commercial melba toasts and dead simple to make. You take white bread, remove the crusts, grill on both sides, then slice in half horizontally and grill again.

I have to admit the pâté was absolutely delicious. It almost made it worthwhile. But really, I’m not sure it was worth the pain considering the stuff at the delicatessen is so good.

On the other hand, liver pâté is not the only type of pâté in the world. There’s a recipe for kipper pâté right above the chicken liver pâté recipe that looks lovely and simple. And I had a great aubergine pâté from an Italian deli today. So perhaps I’ll be making pâté after all, just not in this form.

Chilli broccoli salad (and salmon)

The second thing we made was a lovely salad from Skye Gyngell’s cookbook A Year in my Kitchen. The salad involves broccoli that has been cooked but is still crunchy, radicchio and frisee lettuce. It is dressed with chilli and garlic oil, roasted red onions, lemon zest and juice, anchovies, olives and salt and pepper. It was a wonderful salad and would be almost as good without the anchovies for vegetarians or anchovy-haters. (I say almost because I love anchovies!).

We cooked salmon to go with it and we were shown how to fry or to roast in the oven in a parcel of aluminium foil. I really enjoyed it roasted – it tasted very clean and healthy.