Save the liver! Call them offal, just don't call them trash BY ANDY KING

So what’s wrong with beef lips?

That was one of the biggest offending ingredients, according to gross-outers at school picnics, in the happy hot dog with which you were about to stuff your face. Beef lips, pig snouts, all those things that usually repulse us of the pre-packaged nations — those are the things we’re supposed to shrink from. Just look at the very classy Fear Factor, now in syndication: Every gross item that those Abercrombie and Fitch models are "forced" to eat is a delicacy somewhere in the world. When Chef Andre, my French instructor at cooking school, saw a whole pig head revealed as the disgusting item those poor sots on television were supposed to down to move on to Round Three, he responded in this way:

"Holy sheet! Dat fecking thing looks deelishious! Pass eet over here, dammit!"

In this country, non-immigrant diners eat painfully little of the available edibles on your average meat animals. Strip steaks, chops, tenderloins, the Hanger steak, those are what you see on menus. In the grocery store, some more options are available, like chuck roasts and the mysterious London Broil (usually whatever cheap cut they feel like calling London Broil that day), but you get my point. If not, let me again quote someone far more direct: Anthony Bourdain describing blood and guts, "the good stuff," from Les Halle’s Cookbook (Bloomsbury — if you don’t have this cookbook, order it from that book Web site now): "When we look back at ‘what went wrong’ with American cuisine, in the era following the second World War, it began when stuff like this started disappearing off the menu."

You can’t even tell certain people that bacon — a staple in the American morning, and the meat product most commonly missed my vegetarians according to a personal survey — is the cross-section of a pig’s belly muscle. The belly, you explain, running your hands along your own, and they cringe. Why?

Because they have to picture the animal itself, and they want their meat to appear on a Styrofoam platter, wrapped in plastic. An animal is cute, a cut of meat is not. An animal is something to be named and petted, unless it’s a slaughter animal, then it is something to be ignored until it appears masked in a sesame seed bun. Muffin gets carried around in a handbag; No. 27462 gets shots, a conveyor belt, and a bolt to the brain.

Am I saying this to recruit new vegetarians, or worse yet, vegans? Not on your life. Those who discover the truth about stockyards and give up on meat altogether for that reason are leaving their local farmers, who allow their animals to graze and wander, in the lurch. Don’t throw the farmer out with the whole system; it is, you guessed it, yet another reason to go local.

Besides, even if your hot dog does contain things that you wouldn’t normally eat, what would you have the processors do, throw them out? Would wasting edible parts just because they’re unpopular make anyone feel better?

It shouldn’t surprise then that when old-school culinarian and coworker Ellen asked if I wanted in on a whole local organic lamb she was having slaughtered for just a few people, I said yes before she finished speaking. This is the same woman who eats dandelion greens from her back yard, loves to forage, and sighs while talking about her grandfather curing his own homemade sausage in his barn, so I knew what she was offering was a once-in-a-season type of deal. I was early in the asking, so I reserved a whole leg that I would butcher myself, the heart, and the kidneys — to be honest, I don’t think there was a line for those last two.

The reason I got those items was simply because I had never tried them before, and I wanted to be sure they weren’t thrown away. The authorities wouldn’t let me have the head — including the tongue, which I was all amped to corn, like brisket — but I was excited to eat one item more than any other.

I have an interesting relationship with the kidney, it being the chosen subject of my father’s medical studies, as well as the subject for every science project I presented for four or five years running back in grade school. Despite our closeness, though, I’d never eaten one. Seared until just pink on the inside, served with a sauce of Applejack, stock, and butter, it was rich and tender, with a mineral tinge that lingered on the tongue.

Just to remind you that the organ filters the entire animal’s supply of blood. Just to remind you to remember where it came from.

PUNCHY: Those delish kidneys came from a lamb raised on Sunrise Acres Farm, in Cumberland. Sally Merril’s poultry, cows, and sheep are raised hormone- and antibiotic-free — she also has certified organic vegetables you can access through farmer’s markets and CSA.

Andy King can be reached at dinnerwithandy@yahoo.com