Eating Lamb Liver & Jerusalem Grill with Chicken Livers, Hearts and Breasts
Sunday I went to the Santa Fe Farmers market and bought weird meat from De La Ranch. Make no mistake, they have amazing meat and you don’t’ have to buy just weird meat but I wanted to make two recipes that took meat that is more difficult to find and De La Ranch has that for sure. The first thing I bought was lamb liver. I will say that any time I think about eating liver the quote from Silence of the Lambs comes to mind: “I ate his liver with fava beans and a nice chianti”. That I did not do but I did need liver to make a Turkish or Lebanese dish that uses quickly sautéed lamb livers and serves them as a salad with red onion and parsley. I used Ozlem’s Turkish Table website for the recipe. Now, while lamb liver might not sound so appetizing and I am really not a fan of cleaning things like liver to cook, the end result was really wonderful. It was not a heavy dish and the lamb was not strong tasting and very tender. We had this for lunch and we sat outside in the sun and had a nice salad that was lightly spiced with sumac and lemon. Have to love San Diego….
The second group of weird meats (chicken livers and hearts) were combined with chicken breast to make something called Jerusalem Grill or Meorav Yerushalmi. I remember seeing this when I lived in Jerusalem but I was far too busy eating the falafel with my friends Michelle and Maryellen to branch out to eat chicken parts. To make this, I sautéed the livers, hearts and chicken breasts with a variety of spices and onions and served them with the flat bread from Atlas market. They can be served in pita but for anyone who has eaten the big sheets of bread from Atlas market can tell you, why use pita when Atlas bread is AMAZING. Several recipes for this are available on the internet and I used Saveur’s.
This was a really delicious sandwich I would make this again-only just use the easier to find chicken breasts. I do understand the reason all three are in the original recipe-each chicken part has a different texture which makes the whole dish more interesting from the very soft liver to the really chewy chicken hearts. That being said, for me the taste would be the same and chicken breasts are so easy to find-no so much the livers and hearts. We had this for dinner. Both recipes, were, of course on the 1000 Foods to Eat Before You Die list.
Even so, it was a weird meat sort of day. Al least no fava beans or chianti present,…
