All Things Chill

Since it was a beautiful day in Seattle (1st one since September 2007 lol), Liana and I hit up the farmers’ market in Ballard on Sunday to pick up a few things and soak up the sun. We picked up a canvas bag full of produce and before we left we checked out the Skagit River Ranch tent to talk to Mary (Hi Mary!).

It was about 11am, which meant the mainstream cuts (ribeyes, pork chops) were gone. Boo. Apparently, there’s a huge line before the market opens that extends 2 blocks! LOL. People love their organic meat I guess. LOL. So, as I learned that all of the “good” meat coolers were empty, I decided to walk to the corner and find a lonely container marked “offal” - entrails and internal organs of a butchered animal - and opened it to find overlooked treasures. LOL.

I found a ton of items that I would have brought home (mMMmmM tripe), but when I saw the package of organic chicken hearts, I had a flashback of all those visits to Brazillian Steakhouses that served me pairs of those delightful chewy bits, carefully roasted on a skewers. $5 later, I was walking home a happy man!

When I got back home, I decided to find a recipe on google to provide me with some guidelines. Epicurious had one, but I didn’t want to use soy sauce. No dice. I called a few culinarians (hey guys and girl! hee hee) and they reiterated the use of strong flavors. I figure that I’d try and mimic everything that I liked in the past to make my dish a reality. w00p w00p recipe follows below!

Chicken Hearts with Cilantro and Lime Crema

Ingredients:

Chicken Hearts
1/2 lb. Chicken hearts
3 tbsp. lime juice
4 garlic cloves, minced
1 shallot, minced
Kosher salt
Freshly Cracked Pepper
Olive oil

Lime Crema
1/2 cup sour cream
1 lime, juiced & zested
Cilantro

Fabrication:
1. Combine all ingredients in a zip top bag - let marinade for at least 2 hours or overnight.
2. Preheat broiler on high.
3. Pull hearts from marinade and pat dry. Discard liquid.
4. Place in oven-proof container and broil for 10 minutes, or until golden brown on top.
5. Mix ingredients for lime crema while hearts are cooking
6. Serve on a pre-heated plate with crema and garnish with cilantro

Delicious! Nice and tender, but with the robust flavors from being under intense heat. The lime juice really give it a nice twang and provided a safety net that could cover up any off flavors. I’d totally serve this again with toothpicks and a party of 5 or more!

Since this experiment, I’ll prolly go ahead and pull the trigger on The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating , a book that’s been patiently waiting in my Amazon Wishlist. You never know when you’ll find some frozen animal parts in your friend’s freezer!

Offal-ing in love with the nasty bits!

~Spec

This entry was posted on Monday, May 19th, 2008 at 11:29 am and is filed under Cheap [and GOOD] Eats, Cooking Culture, Cuisine, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.