If you won't eat the fish, I'm going home to mother.

Once again I find myself having to live with the consequences of rushing blindly into marriage with someone who turns his nose up at perfectly acceptable run-of-the-mill foodstuffs. And while refusing to eat anchovies isn’t too restricting – what with them being very small and quite expensive – rejecting cheap and tasty dinner on the flimsy grounds that you didn’t like what your mother did with liver when you were five is just ridiculous.

Admittedly, mothers do have an odd habit of buying ox liver and then frying the living shit out of it for some reason. I know it’s possible to eat shoe leather, but you’d usually wait until you were very much in extremis before you tried it. But succulent and delicious chicken liver cooked in brandy with a dash of cream is hardly comparable, is it?

Anyway, liver remains firmly off the menu, which is annoying when it costs pennies and tastes like something you’d pay 6€ a tub for.

But having seen him eat paté on several occasions, I formulate a cunning plan …

Chicken Liver Paté

You will need: 225g chicken livers; 150g butter; 2 tblsp brandy; spot of mustard; 2 cloves garlic; thyme.

Fry off the livers in a bit of the butter, then put them in a blender. Melt the rest of the butter and pour that into the blender as well. Deglaze the pan with the brandy and pour that in as well. Add all the rest of the ingredients and whizz the whole lot to a smooth paste. Chill in the fridge for a few hours before eating.

Result! Not only does he pig the lot, he asks when we can have it again. You can use this as some kind of fancy starter with salad stuff or you can just plaster it all over buttered toast and scoff it (we went for option 2, needless to say). It gets more alarmingly garlicky the longer it sits in the fridge.