As promised, we shook things up with our normal food routine and added some organ meat to one meal this week.  See this post for the story of how my significant hair loss indicated a need for more Vitamin A, found abundantly in organ meats, particularly liver. The organ meat is typically not palatable but we vowed to try to make it work in our day-to-day Paleo meals and report back to you on how we did.

We decided to start right away, but truthfully I wasn’t completely comfortable with this experiment.  If I thought about it too much, I would have lost my nerve. So I decided it wasn’t too scary to pick up some processed pork liver in the form of Braunschweiger from our local grocery store. I know it’s not the quality grass-fed beef liver that really gets a you a bang for your buck, but baby steps.

 

 

 

 

The ingredients weren’t the greatest, but the number 170% (next to daily intake for Vitamin A) gave me the courage I needed to place it in my shopping cart.

 

 

 

 

My first attempt was gutsy. I choked down 2 slices and then placed a half slice on Charlotte’s lunch plate and told her it was a new kind of salami. She tried it and then set it right back down on the plate. 

 

 

 

 

Our next attempt was more thought-out. With some strategic spices, we’d sneak it into the weekly burgers that we grind at home with grass-fed meat and sausage.

We combined 1 pound of grass-fed ground beef with 1 pound mild Italian sausage and 7 ounces of pork liverwurst (Braunschweiger).  To the meat mixture, we added 1 diced shallot, 1 egg, the juice of 1 whole lemon, (1 TBSP salt), 1  TBSP pepper, 1 TBSP garlic powder, 1 TBSP Worcestershire sauce, 1 TBSP spicy brown mustard, 1 tsp paprika, 1 tsp chili powder. This makes 7-10 patties.

 

 

 

 

We combined all the meats using our grinder attachment.

 

 

 

 

 

We added all of the above spices and ingredients to the meats and formed patties.

 

 

 

 

We barbecued the patties for 2-4 minutes each side for rare burgers. A few of us had cheeseburgers.

 

 

 

 

We topped the burger with fixin’s and served ours with some steamed broccoli.

 

 

 

 

The results: definitely edible. I would dare to say tasty and delicious, but the processed pork liver was salty, making for a salty burger, especially considering we added additional salt to the meat. But overall, the liver taste was well disguised and the girls ate the their entire burgers without any problem, although we did give them a special treat in the form of some ketchup.

Next time we cook with processed liver, we will leave out the added salt. If we were to cook with real grass-fed beef livers, we would probably leave the salt in. Stay tuned for that post. I’ve hit a bit of a snag in my search for the real grass-fed beef livers. My source will not have them available until summer, so yesterday I casually asked the butcher at my local grocery store if he had any beef liver (like I do this all the time) and surprisingly he had a whole section of organ meats–beef heart and tongue, but no liver. I wasn’t brave enough to try the heart or tongue, but I did walk away from the meat counter with a promising feeling like I wasn’t the only one in the world eating offal.

It occurred to me that if you are new to the Paleo world, you may think eating Paleo means eating weird or different foods, so therefore we are weirdos and this diet is not for you. In order to show the awesomeness that Paleo is and that we really are pretty normal folks, I took some photos of some delicious Paleo meals we had over the weekend. 

Saturday night’s dinner was grilled Rib-eye steaks with peeled white potato french fries (fried in coconut oil), steamed artichokes, and grilled broccoli stalks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday morning’s breakfast was coconut flour waffles, eggs fried in grass fed butter, bacon, and fresh berries. (Thanks Gina for sharing the waffle recipe with us. We loved it!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunday evening’s dinner was pasture-raised barbecued chicken with grilled asparagus spears and roasted cauliflower.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Look delicious? Feel free to comment or ask questions about these meals and for more great Paleo meals and recipes, check out the cooking blogs on the Paleo Community page.