Master Chef is currently doing its Professionals version on TV. It’s our favourite version of the show as you can expect the contestants to actually know what they’re doing when set a challenge.

One such challenge recently was to cook calves liver with a bordalaise sauce. It was such a cheffy thing: flouring offal, frying in butter and spooning it over while it fries, making a sauce from scratch with stock, and I really wanted to give it a try.

I won’t be challenging myself to do it in 15 minutes though. I can barely turn an oven on in 15 minutes! It took me an hour to prep things; oh I did make mash potatoes in that time to make into Duchess potatoes in the oven later.

For the Bordalaise sauce, basically a red wine sauce with… OK I don’t have demi-glace or bone marrow: beef stock pot and some gravy granules will have to do! Anyway fry off shallots, garlic & mushroom stalks, add red wine, and said cheaty stock and granules.

That cooks down while the potatoes heat up in the oven. Meanwhile I pref the calves livers by seasoning and dusting in flour.

Then it’s crunch time… sliced mushrooms and red wine vinegar in the sauce.

Add fry the calves liver in butter. No pics of this as it was very hectic!

I was, however, disappointed during the frying. Despite using more butter than is safe for anyone to eat, I still didn’t have enough to properly spoon over the frying livers. How much butter do professional chefs use!?

Plus chefs would have finished the sauce with more butter… I refrained from that. I already had too much liquid in my sauce, plus enough butter on the livers to feed an army!

While I didn’t get to spoon the livers, I did manage to cook them properly, coloured on the outside, nice and pink in the middle.

As we were eating, I realised that this is not only the first time I’ve cooked liver, it’s the first time I’ve ever eaten liver as the main meat in a meal – never had a steak of it like this before! It’s really strong tasting, but as it’s just quick fried on each side it’s still nice and tender. Sauce was also deep in taste, playing nicely off the meat. Potatoes had that nice crispy skin you get from Duchess-ing them, and stopped the sauce just turning them into slime before you’re ready to dig into them!

All in all, very happy: cooked cheffy thing, ate stuff we don’t normally eat. Oh and as it’s offal – dead cheap!