The Ultimate Retro WW Guest Post - LIVER LIVES!

All I can say about this next guest post is: BRAVO! My buddy Diane from the WW message boards is quite a gem. She stepped up to the plate and hit a home run with this liver recipe. I have successfully avoided the dreaded "liver rule" during the past year of my Retro WW adventure. But thanks to Diane--the Retro WW Experiment will forever include one fantastic liver dish that will go down in history. Hooray?

If you think the switch to PointsPlus was an ordeal, don't expect any sympathy from the WW'ers who made it to goal in the 70s. The program back then had a lot of crazy notions about weight loss, but the most notorious was the requirement to eat liver once a week. So when Mimi asked for volunteers to help try some crazy retro recipes, I just had to go for the liver - no half measures for me!

Here's the recipe Mimi sent:

Liver and Apple Salad
6 oz. cooked liver, diced
1/2 cup diced celery
1/2 cup canned bean sprouts, drained & rinsed
1/4 medium green pepper, diced
1 medium apple, cored & diced
2 tbsp diced pimiento
1 envelope instant chicken broth & seasoning mix
1 tbsp mayo
1 tsp lemon juice

Mix all ingredients. Chill in bowl. Unmold on a bed of lettuce. Makes 1 dinner serving.

I made it for some game friends for luncheon today, and I have to say, it wasn't half bad. But it wasn't half good, either, so I won't make it again.

I should start out by saying I like some organ meats. I do a giblet gravy. I serve chopped liver and liverwurst at parties. I once made Julia Child's chicken livers in cognac. But this recipe had something far grosser in it: canned bean sprouts. I could not cope with the La Choy stuff I bought, so I subbed them for fresh. That's the only way I adapted the recipe. (Plus, I packed it into a ring mold to be extra fancy.)


The recipe assumes you've already got some cooked liver on your hands. Just on the off chance you don't, here's how you cook them:

1. Rinse the livers well under cold running water
2. Pick them over to remove any pieces of fat or any black or green spots
3. Dry them well and crank up your kitchen exhaust fan to 11 (liver, frankly, smells nasty when it's cooking)
4. Saute in a nonstick pan in a little canola oil, turning frequently until cooked through
5. Chill thoroughly before dicing up

Since I was making this for company, I doubled the recipe. It's really mostly fruit and veg, hiding the liver pretty effectively. The diced-up ingredients looked fine in the bowl, but when I mixed it all together, the colorful apples and veggies got coated with a none-too-lovely brown liver residue. Ew.


I packed the mess into a tinned ring mold well-sprayed with Pam, covered it with plastic and chilled it for a couple of hours. It unmolded very nicely onto a platter, and I served it forth with my 1970s Vera Neumann napkins.


No one got sick. No one had seconds. One friend cleaned his plate, more out of politeness than delight. One friend wouldn't touch it. Their 4-year-old daughter said she wanted to try it, but then she chickened out. My dog's attitude was, "All the more for me!"