Cazz did cook

Time to make the Xmas pâté. I have blogged the recipe on my tumblr, so there is no need to repeat it here. Suffice it to say, the pâté is good. 

I tried two new gadgets today. My shiny cast iron mincer, and the dough hook for my hand-held mixer. 

Neither of them worked quite as well as I had hoped. I thought the dough hook might save me some kneading time for the bread I was making, but the mixer motor probably isn't powerful enough. The hook did collect up some dough, but not all of it, and I ended up kneading by hand anyway. It would probably work ok for pastry, which is lighter and needs less work. The bread turned out ok though. I made some rolls to have with meatball burgers, and a loaf of fennel-seed and raisin bread (I bought one once from Carluccio's and really liked it). 

I was using pork mince for the pâté, so decided to make meatball burgers à la Toria  (recipe on CazzCanCook). They were really good. 

But back to the gadget testing. The mincer's main purpose in life is to mince liver for Xmas pâté. It worked, but there were some problems. 

The first was the amount of space for a "catching vessel". Liver is really oozy, so needs to be caught in a bowl. The only one that would fit under the mincer was a shallow soup bowl with a wide rim. The bowl didn't have the capacity to contaim all the minced liver in one go, so several transfers were needed. There was a lot of drippage from both the bowl and the mincer during these transfers. The liver also started to seep out behind the ring that holds the blades in place, then eventually backed up and oozed through the handle seating, dripping onto the floor (but fortunately not onto my feet). It was also a nightmare to clean- lots of corners and angles inside for stuff to get caught in. The mincer is very pretty to look at, but I can't even use it as an ornament, as it is so heavy it's likely to make my shelves tip over. 

Sadly, neither gadget gets ten out of ten today.