Sunday, November 8, 2015

Baked Liver with Apples

 Lever med æbler & løg

A dish to honor Pete Fisher, forgotten LGBT Hero. 
 
November 15th is National Clean out the Refrigerator Day!
Slave finds 3 lbs of donated frozen beef liver in the freezer. Now a great meal of liver & onions can be just the thing for a chilly Autumn day. However, there are SOME people who do not appreciate the taste of liver. It is healthy, it is relatively cheap! It should be on the table.
When buying beef liver, you want to look for calves' liver, and soak it in milk for 20 minutes before cooking.


Most recipes for liver are just variations on the old “fried with onions” meal recognized the world over. Slave hopes this presentation will produce an easy way to a great tasting meal. As a bonus: we'll hand make a gift while cooking this!



Ingredients:
1 pound beef liver
sliced 2 medium apples
1½ teaspoons salt
⅛ teaspoon black pepper
6 slices bacon cut in pieces
Directions:
On the night before we are going to start the onions, by caramelizing them. This CAN be a tedious process of stirring for hours! Not slave's way!
Caramelizing the Onions:

Ingredients:
3lbs bags of small to medium sized yellow onions
6 tablespoons olive oil
1tbs sweet paprika
½ teaspoon kosher salt
½ teaspoon dried thyme
½ stick of butter
½ cup brown sugar
2 tbs balsamic wine vinegar


Directions:
Trim the ends off each onion then halve lengthwise. Remove peel and using a mandolin, finely slice.

Drizzle 2 tablespoons of the olive oil over the bottom of the slow-cooker. Add about half of the onions, sprinkle about half of the salt and repeat with the remaining onions, salt, and olive oil. Sprinkle the paprika & thyme over everything and then use tongs to toss the contents so the onions are evenly coated with oil.



Place the lid on the crock, turn the heat to HIGH, and let it cook for 9-10 hours:
After 10 hours, the onions will be golden-brown and soft, and they will have released a lot of liquid. Using a ladle, skim this liquid out and reserve for baking the liver.
Turn the heat down to LOW and continue cooking for another 3 to 5 hours. Check every hour or so and stop cooking whenever the onions look and taste good to you.



Remove about ½ of the onions with a slotted spoon and transfer them to a large bowl. These will become a fantastic Onion Marmalade to give as a hand made gift! Have a few clean screw-top jars handy.

Preparation

Melt butter in a large nonstick skillet over medium low heat. Add brown sugar to pan; cook 1 minute or until sugar dissolves. Add the caramelized onions. Stir well to coat.
Uncover and add vinegar to onion mixture. Cook, uncovered, 10 minutes, stirring frequently or until mixture is very thick. Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt & pepper.
Spoon into the resealable jars and let cool with the lids closed. This will help form a nice seal. 
Warp a piece of ribbon around the neck of the jar. The ribbon can hold a small gift card describing the marmalade and the date sealed. What a great gift! It is wonderful on all kinds of toasts, or used in cooking for extra flavor, even as toppings on sandwiches or baked potatoes! Keep refrigerated.
------- ----------

Day of:
Preheat oven to 325 degrees.



Do your cutting: peel & core the apples and slice them into a large bowl covered with a damp paper towel.


Place liver in greased shallow casserole. Cover with apple slices, onion, salt, and pepper.



Top with bacon pieces and add the onion juice you collected from the cooker.


Cover with foil and Bake for 1½ hours, removing cover during last 20 minutes of baking.

Slave likes to keep this meal simple with a bread and maybe a nice green like broccoli.



For our music:

Happy to serve my Master Indy
socialslave

To satisfy and restore.
To nourish, support and maintain.
To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,
to nurture, assist, and sustain
..I cook!

Please buy slave's cookbook:

The Little Black Book of Indiscreet Recipes by Dan White http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00F315Y4I/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_vAT4sb0934RTM via @amazon





Peter Fisher Gay hero



Not to be confused with Mark Lowe Fisher , an early member of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an activist organization formed in 1987 in New York City.

Peter Fisher was born May 19, 1944 in Richmond, Virginia, went to Amherst College for two years, enlisted in the Air Force rather than wait to be drafted, then graduated Magna Cum Laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University in 1969. He wrote: “was pursuing a graduate degree but resigned to become a full-time homosexual. I have yet to regret it!”

He joined GAA in 1970 where he met Marc Rubin. Their loving relationship lasted 37 years until Marc’s death in 2007. The GAA had split off from the Gay Liberation Front with the goal of "writing the revolution into law." Fisher led a number of the "zaps", or protests that targeted at anti-gay public figures and businesses, as well as serving as an unofficial historian for the group.

In 1971, the GAA had put forward a bill (the first in the country to propose protections on the basis of “sexual orientation.”). City Councilman Saul Sharison refused to allow it to be heard in committee. Fisher led more than a thousand people from the GAA Firehouse to Sharison’s high rise at 70 East Tenth Street and got clubbed by the police.
“It was the most nightmarish scene I had ever witnessed: long, brutal clubs smashing left and right, landing on people’s heads, the crowd panicking, pushing first to the barricades and then falling back,” he wrote.
He and his life partner Marc Rubin were arrested, but five days later the hearing was scheduled on the bill.

Veteran gay and AIDS activist Bill Bahlman, who worked with Fisher, said, “Whenever he spoke at a GAA meeting, everybody listened. He could turn the debate on an issue around. And at demonstrations, he was larger than life.”
Both were S&M activists as well as gay activists. They declared their lifestyle in their dress. There was a dignity and power and demand for justice just in the way they walked hand-in-hand in Central Park.”

Steve Ault, a close friend of Rubin’s, said, “When Marc got sick with prostate and brain cancer, Pete did heroic work caring for him.”

Perry Brass, another veteran of the Gay Liberation Front, wrote, “I remember Pete as a very handsome, very charismatic, blonde young man. He was always dressed either in leather or a tight, beautifully fitting T-shirt, but he was totally devoted to GAA and the cause of real gay liberation, that is, leaving self-hatred, leaving oppression, and forging a new identity as a gay man.”

Among Peter Fisher's books:
Special Teachers/Special Boys (1979) (with Marc Rubin)
Dreamlovers (1980)
Black Star (1983) 
 
He is best known for:
The Gay Mystique: The Myth and Reality of Male Homosexuality (1972)
The book chronicled the early post-Stonewall movement. It also explained homosexuality to straight people and to homosexually-oriented people still coming to terms with themselves. This is a must read book!

Peter Fisher described his intense joy marching in the Christopher Street Liberation Day march in 1970 (the first Pride March ever):
    There’s no going back after that. You can’t feel those things and take them back to the closet and nurse them. When you know what It really means to be free, you know that freedom is life. Do you know how it tastes to be alive for the first time? Oppression in any form requires the complicity of the oppressed. To come out is to refuse to oppress oneself, refuse to play the game.”
Today his name is mostly forgotten but his writing still shines as a bacon to guide any across that “rocky bar” of coming out.


                        Marc Rubin with Peter Fisher

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