I Would Do Anything, But I Won't Do That

Today I'm going into the archives and bringing forth a little editorial.  I thought I would share this for a Replay Sunday.  Now if you are a Meatloaf fan, the singer not the dish, then you would kind of maybe get my title if you don't well tough.   

I am not a picky eater. As evidenced by the fact I was willing to eat squirrel head soup as long as I didn’t have to suck the heads. I am a pretty adventurous epicurean. I will try just about anything once and will try it again even if I’ve had it before just to make sure I really don’t like it. I will not go hungry from being a finicky eater, unless the only thing left on earth to eat is liver. I will eat shoe leather, tree bark, stink weed, dog pooh well maybe not dog pooh, before I will eat liver.

I remember being a small child living in a house where both my mother and father really LIKED liver and onions. I just can’t understand why, how yuck Liver. Now I’m going to be a big fat hypocrite here and say I will eat chicken liver as long as it’s floured and battered and deep fried. Heck I’ll eat just about anything, shoe leather, tree bark, stink week, dog pooh as long as it’s deep fried. I mean after all I am from the south. I don’t know what it is about calf liver that just oogs me out. I can’t handle the texture, the smell, the taste or even the thought of calf liver.

When I was little I would do anything and everything to avoid eating liver. My mother would make me sit at the table until I had eaten at least three bites of it. There was many a night I fell asleep at the dining table long after everyone had eaten, cleaned up the kitchen and gone on to watch “I Spy” or “Dragnet” or my very favorite “Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom”.




Didn’t you just love it when Marlin Perkins would send poor Jim into the lions den? He would say things like “Oh look that man-eating python has Jim around the neck strangling him to death. Oh Jim be careful don’t hurt the python…” It really was the precursor to the National Geographic and Discovery Channels. Only no “Dirty Jobs” and “Survivor Man”. I wonder if Marlin made Jim eat liver.

Kahuna feels equally if not more disdain for liver than I do. He won’t even eat chicken liver, even if it is floured battered and deep fried. He can’t stand the smell of liver. He was also raised in a home where his mother and father LIKED liver. He was as a fact not allowed to trick-or-treat until he had eaten his liver. I think this is why he has such a dislike for Halloween. I mean what a way to scar a kid for life, make him eat liver BEFORE he can trick or treat. Why not just make him cut his big toe off, or lock him in the closet with big hairy spiders? He used to sneak his liver to his dog Tippy. Tippy and Kahuna were best friends, I mean who but your best friend would eat your liver for you? To this day Kahuna still talks lovingly of Tippy.

I had a friend who hated liver almost as much as I did. When she was little they had a big round pedestal that separated in the center in order to insert an extension to the table. Only my friend would put her liver in the crack of the table and it would fall into the hollow pedestal. She did this for years and for years her mother would complain that she could never get that awful smell out of her kitchen. She would clean and clean, move that table here and there and even had the exterminator come because she was sure something had died in the wall of her kitchen. The whole time my friend knew what the smell was, but kept silent. Yes this is the friend with which you trust your secrets. Finally years later her mother got rid of the stinky table giving it to the local charity. My friend came home for a weekend to find the table gone and asked if her mother had emptied the pedestal of the years of liver she had hidden there. You can imagine what her mother fed her for supper that night.

Honey do you smell somethig funny?  And why won't the dogs leave the

table alone?

I tried to eat liver after I had grown-up. I really did. I found an exotic Spanish recipe for liver and purchased a big slab. I followed the directions and soaked it in buttermilk then browned it and slow cooked it in gravy of tomatoes, onions and peppers. I served it over saffron rice and I tired. I really, really tried to eat it. I cut a small piece made sure it was sufficiently slathered with gravy and onions and I got it in my mouth and tried to chew. Before I could masticate once the taste buds that taste liver kicked in and then the olfactory glands went into action then the gag reflex hit and the next thing I knew that little piece of calf’s filter organ went flying out of my mouth and right onto the wall. I knew from that point on it didn’t matter what you did to it, how you cooked it or how you disguised it my liver buds would know it was liver and my gag reflex would thankfully get rid of it for me.

So now if you will excuse me I am going to go eat a real dinner of Sea Urchin Sushi, raw oysters and I may even have a side of crawfish and suck the guts out of the head.