What do you do with the livers when you buy a fresh, whole chicken with all its head and feet still intact? Well, you make pate of course! (The livers, not the chicken’s head and feet!)

It’s actually so easy to dismiss those livers and I almost made the mistake of throwing it away, thinking that they belong to the waste bin. But I recovered in time and in the midst of making my Roasted Chicken Rice last week, I thought I would experiment with a new recipe inspired by one of the dishes we had in Prague with the use of one of the hottest peppers in the world: Bhut Jolokia.

Reputed as one of the top 5 hottest peppers in the world with 1 million SHU (Scoville Heat Units), a teeny-weeny use of it works wonders for the dish for that little bit of kick that makes you crave for more.

A quick google later, I decided to adapt a pate recipe inspired by Jamie Oliver and giving it a little twist of my own. Magic was created in virtually no time at all!

Home-made pate, crackers and a side of Dutch cheeses…hmmm…life is wonderful!

Bhut Jolokia & Truffle Oil Chicken Liver Pate

2015-07-13 13:06:00

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Ingredients

1. 180g butter
2. 240g fresh chicken liver
3. 2 shallots, peeled and finely chopped
4. 2 cloves garlic, peeled and pressed
5. sprigs of fresh sage
6. a sprig of fresh thyme
7. 1/2 tspn cumin
8. 2-3 drops of truffle olive oil
9. Salt and pepper to taste
10. A dash of Bhut Jolokia chilli flakes

Instructions

1. Pre-heat oven to 120 °C.
2. Put half the butter in an aluminium foil container and put it in the oven till it slowly melt and separated (about 10 minutes). Remove from the oven and strain the yellow clarified butter into a separate container. Set aside to cool. Discard the rest
3. Heat a little olive oil in the pan. Fry the shallots and pressed garlic till soft. Add in the cumin and thyme. Mix thoroughly. Remove from the pan and set aside. Clean the pan with a kitchen paper towel. Turn up the heat and fry the livers with some sage
4. Cook the liver for a couple of minutes on each side till they are lightly coloured. Leave it a little pink on the inside - overcooking the livers would mean that you are likely to get a grainy texture rather than a smooth one.
5. Remove the livers and chuck them in a bowl, along with the pan-fried shallots and garlic earlier. Blitz them up till it becomes a soft puree. (I use a hand blender). Then add the remaining softened butter, salt and pepper and continue to blitz.
6. Lastly, add in a dash of Bhut Jolokia Chilli flakes and truffle oil. Mix well with a spoon and transfer the mixture into a serving bowl.
7. Sprinkle the remaining sage over the pate, then spoon the clarified butter over it. Leave it to set in the fridge for at least an hour.
8. Serve whenever you are ready and dig in with crackers or toasted bread.

Grubbs n Critters https://grubbsncritters.com/

Desperately wanting to be away from the massive crowd in the heart of Prague, we decided to join a tour to Kutna Hora located just under 1.5 hours away from the busy city. The ride to and from Kutna Hora was pretty scenic with lots of greens all around as well as bright,yellow fields filled with acres of Colza fields; a sight too beautiful to ignore! From the air, they looked absolutely stunning.

But those are not just yellow-nothing Colza fields, mind you! The Colzas are being grown for their oil used extensively for public lighting and now being used to produce bio-diesel!

Fancy a little exposure to some bizarre decorations of chandeliers, crosses and a pyramid (amongst others!) made from real human bones while at Kutna Hora? Then be sure to visit the Ossuary at Sedlec, a medieval Gothic chapel that has, for centuries, housed the remains of 40,000 people.

This place reminded me of the Catacombs in Paris where I once visited more than a decade ago, except that the Ossuary at Sedlec, or otherwise also known as the Bone Church, happens to be a place of worship. Word has it that these bones were the remains of plague victims and that some ingenious architect and master builder had breathed a new life into a once burnt-down, abandoned church and decorated the church with the bones while carefully arranging them into shapes and art pieces in honour of the victims!

Bizzare? or Unique? You pick. The consolation was that all the bones had been disinfected and bleached in chlorinated lime, so at least we know they are super clean.

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Lunch soon followed after at a traditional Czech restaurant (read: tourists only) with a 3-course meal of soup, Czech beef goulash and a home-made apple turnover that pretty much kept us going till dinner. I still maintain that the Hungarian Goulash is the best there is and the Czech version somewhat paled in comparison.

The rest of the time in Kutna Hora was spent walking up steep slopes, climbing up stairs and navigating cobbled-stoned alleys in the medieval-looking area where we were to head out to Saint Barbara, a Gothic Cathedral. It was a walk where I was almost certain that men in hooded robes ala Ku Klux Klan would come springing up on us and rounding us up with candles and some serious prayers!

The view though, was all worth it. Beautiful, magnificent and breath-taking. This is where I’d be saying that if you can’t go to Prague, I’m taking the bits and pieces of Prague to you!

The weather had been awesome that day and it was slightly after 3.30 p.m when we left Kutna Hora. We had a little walk-about around the Jewish Quarters when we arrived back in Prague and just in time to stuff our faces after that, at a nice little gem of a restaurant which we stumbled upon on our 1st day in Prague saddled along the Day Market area.

And that, my friends, would require a dedicated post in itself because the place, called Chilli Point happened to be the highlight of our trip. What can I say, I am a foodie and I am a sucker for good food! More about our foodie adventures later! 😀