OK, easy-peasy. Save up your livers until you've got 3 or 4, or this is a lot of work for little result. It doesn't matter much whether you use 1 liver or 10, so wait a bit. Just heave them in a plastic bag and freeze solid. In the other corner of a biggish ziploc, put all the fat pads and excess skin -- the fat pads are the big hunks of yellow fat you find in the opening of the cavity and sometimes at the neck. Heave them in too.
You'll find that the livers and the fat weigh about the same, and if not, make up the difference (too much liver, always) with butter. Add butter anyway to about 25% over the weight of liver, unless you're on a diet. Mince the fat and skin as fine as you can stand. Then put all the fat in a smallish skillet and cook over medium-low heat with maybe a couple Tb of water. Stir every once in a while, but otherwise just wait. It takes a while. Eventually you will have a lot of rendered fat and just a little sizzling going on.
Now add some onion, leek, shallot, whatever, chopped pretty fine. Maybe 1/2 a big onion, or a couple shallots, whatever. Don't worry about quantities -- it's irrelevant. If you've got fresh thyme, toss in a sprig or two; very good dry thyme is good too, so chuck in 1 Tb (but don't bother with mediocre stuff -- use other herbs, whatever you have, or ignore). I like a good big clove or two of garlic, sliced thin, but it's up to you. I also usually add 1 tsp Spanish paprika, but some don't like that aggressive flavor.
Cook slowly until the onions are basically melted to nothing and the whole thing is starting to sizzle, which means that there is very little moisture in the pan. Now add the livers, separated into lobes, and sprinkle generously with salt and pepper. Cook just until the livers are barely pink (as opposed to red or gray) in the middle, i.e. a tad underdone. If you wish, now add a scant 1/4 cup cognac or dry sherry, swirl it all around, crank the heat, and boil it off; if you don't do alcohol (like my Muslim friends) then just keep cooking everything gently as before until the livers are just done.
Scrape everything into a food processor bowl, with the metal blade of course, and wait about 3-5 minutes until it cools a tad. Pulse many times until it's all running smoothly, then run it full blast for 1 full minute (actually look -- you'll want to shut it off after 15 seconds). Scrape down and pulse a bit more.
Taste the mess: it should be distinctly salty. If not, season for this. (If you've made pate, you know what I mean -- you must overseason pate to season it properly.)
Scrape the whole mess (and it looks like mess) into a medium wire sieve and work it through into a bowl. Start by stirring a lot, and then eventually work it through with the blade of a rubber spatula. If you are a little nuts, work the result through a fine tamis.
Pack the stuff into a ramekin, cover tightly with plastic wrap, and refrigerate at least 2 hours and preferably overnight.
To serve, let it come almost to room temperature, which takes 15 minutes or so. Spread on crackers or bread.
The cool thing is, it's fantastic and nearly free: when it gets down to it, you bought everything but the cognac and onion already, and for the onion you can just use trimmings because it's all pureed and strained, and you don't need much alcohol and can in fact skip it. So you can do this for almost nothing.
When you eat it, tell me if you think it tastes like it was free.
(Incidentally, Jacques Pepin -- when he ran a little local restaurant in Connecticut -- used to give mini-ramekins of this stuff with the bread basket, for nothing, since it cost him nothing. I betcha it prompted more happiness and thus better tips....)
