Offal is great

I’m too tired at the moment to think of a different prompt or to work on an existing draft but… offal is great. I love it personally a lot and I enjoy cooking with it.

But people around me dislike it, weirdly enough, and some even referred to it as “dog food”. So, liver, hearts and other organs… dog food? What the fuck?

It seems a bit wasteful, in my opinion, especially as offal’s quite healthy and it had a unique taste to it that isn’t quite like “meat” or anything else I’ve had in the past.

My family often used to make chicken hearts for dinner, paired with rice and veggies. When I went shopping, they were out of hearts, so I went with liver instead. Same thing basically – but it has a stronger taste to it. I cooked it with garlic and onions until they were nearly “done”, then added fresh bell peppers, mushrooms and tomatoes, as well as tomato paste, herbs and spices. I like pairing it with rice but mashed potatoes or potatoes in general also work really well.

Honestly, it’s great. I’ve cooked with liver a few times since I moved out but each time I tried something different. This time around it was more like a ragout, I guess. I once kept it super simple with liver and onions paired with potatoes. It’s great either way.

But again, the taste is quite different.

And making this and hearing from some people (including my flatmate) that they haven’t really seen people eat offal is… interesting. Honestly, I was surprised that some people just never cooked with it. At the same time, there are still many things I haven’t tried that would be pretty much “normal” in my parents’ home country. I mean, my grandfather would eat calf brain relatively often or cow tongue… and I wanna try that someday. I just don’t really know what would go with it and how I’d have to prepare it, so gotta look that up sometime.

This sort of stuff is quite intriguing to me since there are so many peculiar things that different cultures do. I’m not sure if this is a cultural thing or not but here in Germany, I’ve never seen people eat fish eyes or bone marrow before – something that is quite normal in my family. Okay, my mother finds that gross but pretty much every other relative of mine has no issues with that.

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well.