From fish eyes to pig ears: Why you should eat the whole animal
Ashleigh VanHouten, a 36-year-old, brown-haired health coach with a new offal cookbook, stands in front of her stove, spatula in hand. Shallots are sizzling in a cast iron skillet, and VanHouten eventually adds shiny brown lumps of chicken liver to the mixture. VanHouten is turning them into a mousse, a popular and simple dish that, for many, is a gateway into cooking and eating offal.
"It's a very rich, creamy, almost sort of sweet something that goes really well with crusty bread or crunchy crackers," she says during her Zoom cooking demo from her kitchen in Ottawa, Ontario. Sparse, brown bookshelves hang on either side of the stove, the place where VanHouten perfected her recipes. "But it's also ... incredibly nutrient dense."