My mad skillz were known. She saw them previously in action at my house.
Valerie Mayz came over with the Kansas City District bank examiners. They took up a floor in a building across the 16th mall from the rest of the employees at the Federal Reserve Bank Denver who have their own State examiners, and their own bank auditors at their Fortress taking up the whole block where Tabor Opera House once stood.
At the time they were a separate lot, a whole different class of people, so they thought. They behaved aloof and dressed differently than most save for management and our own examiners. So they were reluctant at first to join me at home, but once they did word got around over there in their office and without especially trying and doing nothing at all special I nonetheless attained a reputation as host.
I know what party did it too.
For Valerie, I baked half-way nine pounds of bacon, I think, maybe more, to render the fat, to start if off but cook incompletely to be finished later. A bucket of grease was collected.
You don't just reach into the chicken liver bucket and grab a chicken liver and wrap it with bacon and stab it with a toothpick, no, you take each liver and trim off the gunk, anything unsightly, anything with tubes or connective tissue, only nice pieces, then slice the trimmed pieces to uniform chunks. Tiny liver chunks. Each chicken liver makes ten or a dozen. Then do that a couple hundred times. You have piles of liver gunk and piles of usable pieces, and piles of liver waiting to be looked at.
Water chestnuts for crunch. Easiest out of a tin. That's the way to go. But to go that extra mile, fresh water chestnuts are much better. They are impossible to peel without wasting half of them, and difficult to slice evenly too, they're a total drag to deal with but deliver an outstanding crunch, and going through all that one imagines alternatives like jicama or possibly apple, but fresh water chestnuts are best but unfortunately not recommended. Way too much of a drag for this number. But if it were just you and me, well, that's a different thing.
The bacon is smeared with brown sugar to overload the sugar already cured in the bacon and overwhelm the oppressively dull thud of liver. The sugar adheres to the cooled bacon grease and spills all over in the process. The piles of bacon strips and brown sugar everywhere guarantee a complete mess tabletop and floor. Add to that chicken liver blood, slippery water chestnuts, slopped up gritted up toothpicks all over the place, the whole ranch-style house smelling like bacon, you think that's a good thing, actually, bacon grease film coating all surfaces, permeating every fiber, it seems and smells so, not a good thing and you are put off rumaki permanently.
Until further notice.
