There are these big questions in life, which we never find the answers for, but I guess we are not supposed to. Rhetorical questions. But I just keep asking them, thinking about them, and trying to find out the answers. Sometimes I am wondering alone in the company of some candles, but sometimes I do share my questions with others, recently with butchers. My latest question was about the chicken giblets. I am not kidding. I mean seriously, where did the heart, liver, gizzard, chicken head with its brain, the muscular neck or the kidney go? And where are the yellow chicken feet or the lungs?

We can buy chickens in plastic boxes, washed from inside and outside. We can buy exactly 600 grams of chicken legs, maybe from 6 different chickens. We can buy 500 grams of cubed chicken breast fillet. Without bones, joints or thews. Nor blood. Was it a chicken at all?

Equally cubed, washed, exactly 500 grams of white, odorless, perfect looking meat pieces have nothing to do with a living animal, which it was before. At least there is no connection in our brain. If there is no blood, we do not even think of a slaughter-house. But all of those small pieces of meats made an animal before. A chicken, which had pumping warm blood from its heart, lungs which took in and out the air, legs which it walked on, a head with constantly blinking and caring eyes for its babies.

I am looking for the lost giblets since I moved to Denmark. Sometimes I am lucky and I meet an old person, who has some memories about eating a whole chicken, neck and crop...And sometimes I am lucky, like last week. I bought a chicken on a farm, and surprisingly enough it had everything! So I used it all. I also found chicken liver in a shop, so I made a liver pate with beets. Enjoy!

Liver pate

300 grams of liver, from an organic, local farm

1 red onion, local

100 g duck fat, organic and local production

100 ml red wine, biodynamic- preferably europian

1 tbsp red wine vinegar

pepper

salt

marjoram

tarragon

1 tsp honey, local

50 g butter, biodynamic, local production

2 tbsp rum/vodka/whisky

150 grams beetroot, local

 

Wrap the beets into aluminium foil, and bake them in the oven on 200 degrees for an hour. Meanwhile you can cook the liver. Chop and braise the onion with fat, on extremely low heat for half an hour. Turn up the heat, add the red wine, steam it, add the vinegar and the spices, but not the salt. When you have a nicely caramelized onion pure, with a divine scent, so it almost makes you sit down and eat the whole with a spoon, then it is ready for the chopped up liver pieces. Turn up the heat, and cook it for a couple of minutes, until the liver loses its pink color. Add butter and the honey, finally the salt. Blend it with more fat, the beets, the alcohol. Optionally add or take away the spices, season it, as you like. Try to follow the seasons with the vegetable you mix it with.

Enjoy the company of a whole chicken, butcher it and use everything. On this way, we waste less food, we can have a better understanding and a more intimate relationship with what we eat. In this case, a liver of an animal.