Devilled Kidneys

Back in November, we finally took delivery of Breakfast.  A whole pig's worth of pork* is a lot to deal with in one hit, but although I haven't kept Every Thing But The Oink up to date, it doesn't mean that we haven't been cooking, eating and enjoying our little pig.

I had picked up the meat from Swillington Farm on Saturday but Sunday was the first opportunity we had to eat any of it.  As is was Sunday we had decided to have a traditional roast, leg to be precise, but that was for our evening meal.  Before that there was the little matter of Sunday Lunch.  I'd not had enough time to cure my own bacon** but that didn't matter as there was one thing that I had been wanting to cook since starting this challenge back in January.

For some reason I had never cooked or eaten Devilled Kidneys.  I put not having cooked the dish myself down to the fact that I live in a house that is not overly welcoming to offal.  I can only imagine that I've never eaten them because I've never been presented with the opportunity.  Well all of that has changed as the only offal that I got back from the abattoir when Breakfast was slaughtered were his kidneys.  

As I said, I'd never cooked Devilled Kidneys before so I turned to the internet and was astounded by the amount of variation in the recipes that I found.  Every celebrity chef you can think of has their own take this 'classic' dish.  Given the range of ingredients and techniques, and with the Hairy Bikers and Nigel Slater as my guides, I threw caution to the wind and cooked my lunch.

The first thing to note is that lamb seems to be the kidney of choice, not pork or beef.  But I was not going to let that get in the way, I had pork kidneys so pork kidneys it was.  Preparing the kidney was simple enough.  By the time I had quartered it the white core was easy to cut out with a knife so there was no need to dirty the kitchen scissors as per almost all of the recipes that I found.

I fried the kidney in butter until browned and then added dijon mustard, tomato puree, worcester sauce and a pinch of cayenne pepper.  Just before serving my kidneys on toasted muffins I added some chives and tasted for seasoning.  It was then that I decided that Nige, Dave and Si had been a little coy with their dishes.  I was under the impression that Devilled dishes needed a fiery kick worthy of Old Nick.  I didn't want to overpower the offal but I wanted much more oomph.  I went for tabasco as it was what I had to hand.

I'm please to say that I loved the Devilled Kidneys.  The richness of the offal with the hot sauce was great.  Z wasn't quite so enamoured but it was my lunch not hers.  I think that was a fitting first dish to cook using the meat of my pig and over the last couple of months we have cooked, preserved, and eaten a lot of pork.  There is still a lot of Breakfast left to be eaten too, I'll tell you about that later.

*almost, there was more of breakfast to come.
**there will be bacon.