Sorry about the overly long hiatus, everyone. It was a hectic last semester of college for me, but I'm out now and living in Texas. Have been cooking a lot lately since I don't have a job and have little else to do, so might start working on my backlog of recipe photos.
This one doesn't really have a recipe, as I kind of made it up as I went along. In my search for cheap food I discovered that you can buy a package of chicken hearts for $.89/lb. My first thought: $.89/lb.!; my second thought: CHICKEN HEARTS??? I looked around on the internet for advice on how to use them. Quite a few people said to marinate them and grill them on a skewer. Most people said to feed them to your dogs.
The main piece of advice was that they're slightly chewy. I attempted to counteract this (as well as the whole "omg I'm eating hearts!" effect) by quartering them (or, rather, making my fiance do it). Then I marinated them in lemon juice, soy sauce, and a little sugar with some chopped jalapeños.
They look kind of funky when they're raw. Kind of sickly grey. Actually they look that way when they're cooked, too, but at that point you can try to excuse it as the color of a nice, caramelized sauce. Which it was. It helps that I fried them in a bit of leftover bacon fat, too. (I never throw out good bacon fat. Waste not, want not, etc.)
I served it on top of brown rice cooked with chunks of carrots (because I wanted another vegetable but didn't feel like doing anything involved) with a fresh salsa of chopped tomato, red onion, jalapeño, lemon juice, and a little salt.
Also some fresh bread, using the easiest no-knead recipe I have ever come across, aptly titled "Really easy-to-make bread." I don't have a bread pan at the moment, so I just added enough extra flour to make the dough stiff enough to hold its shape on a sheet pan.
Now, in all honesty, the point of the salsa was to disguise the taste and texture of the chicken hearts, but believe me when I say that they were actually good! The lemon permeated the meat so strongly that any funky flavor that might have existed went away, and (due to the size of the pieces as well as the lemon, perhaps) the chewiness was hardly perceptible, and the texture and strong meaty flavor blended very well with the bright spiciness of the salsa.
Altogether (not including the bread) it cost about $4.50 for two generous servings, and that was only because the tomatoes were a whopping $1.99/lb. But hey, if I can get decent meat for $.89/lb, I can afford to buy tomatoes. Win/win right there.
