Your Shallow and incomplete guide to cooking food for people who live alone or with cats and are tired of eating ugali with eggs every night.

How to cook a liver with vegetables.

In the book Julie and Julia, Julie describes the buying, preparation , cooking and the eating of liver as requiring special mental preparation.

I agree.

I only cook liver maybe once a year or not at all.

Perhaps when I go to the butchery and see it on display and remember, oh liver is a food item.

I didn't grow up eating liver.

We had access to chicken liver which would get mixed up in the rest of the meat.

I liked to eat the heart though.

I didn't know how to cook liver until my housemate from the Botswana upperclass gave me step by step instructions.

For pig liver.

She also taught me how to bake a ginger flavoured fish.

Then she conned me out of my house deposit  when she graduated and was off to her country setting our other housemate on me claiming I had, her deposit. 

The other roommate was Rwandese.

Thinner than a praying mantis and the daughter of a high profile official in her country.

So she didn't attend her classes but spent her days with a crowd of other moneyed college kids driving fast cars, drinking alcohol by the gallons and breaking into the house each time she misplaced her key.

On silent nights she smoked weed on the balcony with the Nigerian middle aged man down stairs.

The Nigerian man tried to give me a ride to town several times. He called me a snobbish Kenyan until the day he found me walking to my friend's condo on a hot afternoon and he simply said get in the car girl! 

And I sheepishly got in, folded my hands on my laps and thought about kidnapping stories I had heard in the news.

He didn't say a word to me.

When we got to the condo parking

I said thank you and got out.

He didn't stop to offer me rides after that.

The Motswana girl was a good cook. But she didn't cook at all.

Just made cup after cup of coffee which she would drink sitting on the treadmill tricycle that was the only bit of furniture in the large sitting room. That, and an old tv that only broadcast Channel 1 news in Malay. She then would get out to the balcony to smoke some thin  cigarettes.

I broke her coffee cup washing it that time she went to visit her boyfriend, when she came back she was really annoyed, then her friend from her hood back in Botswana came calling and was walking about the house naked.

She also didn't lock the toilet when she was inside and almost gave me a heart attack when I got in and almost went blind with both shock and embarrassment because I had not seen a full woman's grown body since primary school and here was one sitting on a toilet asking me if I was coming in for a shower.

I escaped and spent that weekend at my friend's house. There was no chance of any humans walking around without clothes here.

I ached for the lost deposit but then later on in life I did my math and settled my heart that the deposit was legitimate fees for several cooking classes. 

The Rwandese praying mantis only cooked potatoes with frankfurters and when she did she would use my cooking oil. 

I'd scrowl at her any chance I got but she never would look me in the eye.

 I did learn to make a liver and here is the recipe.

1. Cut the liver into nice cubes.
2. You may rub it with lemon juice to remove that livery smell it's got.
3. Turn it over into a thick frying pan and turn it until it starts to turn Brown.
4. Add a little oil and keep turning it over and over.
5. Sprinkle some salt.
6. Add yellow and red bell peppers, hobo and onions and tomatoes all together and cover for a while.
7. You can add a table spoon of water and let it simmer.
8. Keep checking to see if it looks cooked.
9. It should be soft to cut through and not rubbery.

Enjoy.

I find if I leave it over and eat it the following day it tastes better.

But I have a weird taste choose so don't say I told you to watch your cooked food over night.