As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am cooking for a friend’s birthday party on Saturday. 30-35ish people will attend, so I’ve been cooking pretty much non-stop since I returned home from vacation. Well, either cooking or shopping for ingredients. Regardless, it’s been a busy week. Yesterday was pate and terrine day so I made chicken liver pate (my own recipe) and a duck and fig terrine (which is a recipe from My Paris Kitchen by David Lebovitz). I completely misjudged how long these things would take and I was way off…the wrong way.

The pate was the quicker of the two as it just involves quick cooking the chicken livers in a bit of oil and then combining the ingredients into a food processor and processing until very smooth. You then simply place the pate into a ramekin or container and top it with something that will seal in the pate from the air to prevent spoilage. If you do this, it will last about a week or so in the refrigerator. Based on my experience and based on what I’ve read on the subject, pates tend to benefit from a day or so in the refrigerator so that the flavors can meld and the pate itself can firm up a bit. At any rate, you can seal your pate with clarified butter (as I did) or you can use chicken or duck fat or some sort of gelee. Clarified butter is sort of a pain to do but in my opinion, it’s a lot easier than rendering chicken or duck fat. So, I went with the clarified butter. Though if you look closely at the picture of the pate with its protective butter coating, you will notice little flecks of white in it. That means I didn’t do that great of a job clarifying the butter. I’m pretty sure this was due to the fact that I was losing patience and very tired when I finally got to that stage. Hopefully you will fare better in this regard.

There are lots of ways of making chicken liver pate, with a myriad of suggested methods and ingredients. This recipe is easy to pull off and, in my opinion, it’s pretty tasty. Go ahead and dip your big toe into the pate pool and try it. Serve it with some dark, crusty bread or crackers and some onion marmalade or a similar sort of sweet and savory spread.

Almost forgot…in my opinion it’s important to go with organic chicken livers here. They are a bit more expensive but I’ve used both organic and regular chicken livers and I have to say the color difference alone is amazing. The regular ones are paler, almost red gray, and they have little fatty deposits that are visible and need to be removed. The organic ones, by contrast, sport a very vibrant and deep blood red/burgundy color and generally they are absent of any fatty deposits. It’s a pretty amazing contrast. At any rate, I think it’s worth going organic here. I bought mine at the meat market and they ordered them for me and I simply picked them up the next day. If you don’t want to go through that trouble, use the regular ones…just be sure to remove the whitish/yellow fatty deposits before proceeding.

Enjoy! Recipe follows after the jump… Continue reading →