I'm still here.....

Hey all you people out there! I'm still here. I am now working one job (not two!) and I have time to blog again! I'm sure the three readers I have left will be thrilled (I have more than three readers, right? Maybe? Bueller?).

Anyways, I'm back and I've got yet another recipe for duck legs. I love duck legs. Read about it here. Or here. Or here. This one comes from the New York Times (click for the recipe) and it involves rhubarb (this should tell you how long it's been since I've cooked anything - is rhubarb even still in season?).

Basically, you brown some duck legs and save the fat that comes off (in a glass jar! Zack yelled at me for saving hot duck fat in plastic Tupperware last time - apparently that can give you cancer. Whoops).

You blitz some onion, garlic, ginger, garam masala, vinegar, cayenne, turmeric, black pepper, salt and 1/4 cup water in the blender or food processor (check the link for exact amounts), then saute over medium heat with some of the leftover duck fat. Add some coconut milk and water, bring to a simmer and add your duck legs, a little bit of brown sugar and some chopped rhubarb (it's not just for pies)!


Bring it to a boil, turn the heat to low and simmer (covered) for an hour.


If you have any fresh cilantro or chives, add those on top - I so did not have those. People who sleep five hours a night don't have time to buy fresh herbs. Such is life.

But I'm back! I'm ready to blog and ready to sleep.

I think that some people actually read my blog

Sometimes I write these entries and I think, is anyone besides Meredith and my dad really reading this? And then, every once in a while, the answer is a resounding "yes." It's nice to know that I am not sending these posts out into nothing. So, thank you.

Last weekend, Zack's mom and stepdad visited us, which was awesome (if you scroll back a post or two, there's a nice picture of them). We invited them over for dinner and I made them Duck Legs and Carrots, from The Gourmet Cookbook (which may be my favorite cookbook of all time). They really liked it and so I promised to post the recipe so that they could make it at home.

Warning - I forgot to take many pictures of this dish and then we ate it really fast before I got a final picture. So it's going to be a little picture-lite (but flavor-heavy).

Duck Legs and Carrots
2 medium leeks (white and pale green parts only), chopped
6 duck legs (I used four. Duck is expensive)
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp pepper
1 medium white onion, halved and thinly sliced
8 garlic cloves, peeled
14 medium carrots cut into 1/2 inch thick slices
3 flat leaf parsley sprigs
1 (4 inch) fresh rosemary sprig
2 Turkish bay leaves
1 (3-4 inch long) jalapeno chile
about 6 cups Chicken Stock (I used waaaay less than this. Maybe 2-3 cups and it was more than enough).

Put a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat your oven to 400 degrees (if you have my oven, there is no guarantee that setting it to 400 will equal 400 and so you have to guess high. I need an oven thermometer).

Wash your leeks and drain them well. As Julie Powell says, leeks are muddy little suckers.

Rinse duck (I did not do that) and trim visible fat. Sprinkle duck legs with slat and pepper. Chop the fat that you trimmed and and melt it in a skillet. Pour off all but 1.5 Tbs of fat and save it (I poured it into a plastic container and Zack yelled at me for pouring something hot into something plastic and complained about how we were probably going to die from eating plastic molecules now).

Increase the heat to moderately high and heat fat until hot but not smoking. Brown half your duck legs, skin side down. Make sure it gets nice and brown, take about 5 minutes. Then flip them and cook the other side for about 3 more minutes until it's brown too. Put them aside and do the same thing for your other duck legs.

Drain the fat again. Ducks have so much fat (and it's delicious). Save two Tbs and add the leeks, onions and garlic to the skillet. Cook until soft (about 3-4 min). Add the carrots and cook for three minutes. Season with salt and pepper and then spread all the veggies in a large roasting pan.

Make a fancy little herb bundle by tying your herbs together with kitchen string. If you don't have kitchen string, sometimes I like to use non-flavored dental floss (non waxed, ideally). This is so you can discard the herbs easily at the end. Put the herb bundle in with the veggies. Add the jalapeno now too (you don't chop it or anything - just put it in whole and then worry that Zack will not like it because he can't ever eat spicy things). Nestle the ducks legs skin side up in vegetables and add just enough stock so that most of the leg is submerged, but not the skin.

Bake uncovered until the meat is tender and the skin is crisp. The book says it'll take one and half to one and three quarter hours, but I cooked mine way longer because I wanted the broth to evaporate more and it took a long time. Maybe if your oven actually gets to 400 degrees, it will not take as long for you.


Discard the herb bundle (and the jalapeno if you want - I threw it away before Zack saw it and hoped he wouldn't notice). It was so so so so good. The carrots had so much flavor from being roasted with the duck and the skin was nice and crisp, but the meat was tender and moist. The only problem was that everybody liked it so much that we didn't have leftovers (or any pictures. Whoops).

The skin is the best part

Last week, I was on the Upper West Side, wandering around and I decided to brave the crowds at Fairway. The Fairway has an amazing meat department, so I decided to see what looked good. I found some reasonably priced duck legs and figured, why not?

I picked the simplest method I could fine - the slow roast. All I did was preheat the oven to 300 degrees, put the duck legs in a pan, put salt and pepper on them and bake for 90 minutes, or until the skin turns brown and crispy.


I had two duck legs, but I ate one already by the time I took this picture. See all the fat at the bottom of the pan? You can't? Here it is again.


Yeah, that's a lot of fat. I'm saving it for more cooking later. Duck goes really well with cabbage, so I made some braised cabbage to go with it.


But that's a post for another day.

A meal three months in the making

Three months ago, I read a recipe on The Amateur Gourmet that I wanted to try. It was called Braised Duck Legs for Idiots and I thought, hey, I could make that. I went to Whole Foods to get duck legs and found that they didn't have any. So I went to a butcher shop in Astoria. They didn't have any either. I went home, called a butcher shop, verified that they had some, went there, and they didn't have any. It got pretty frustrating. I posted a query online, asking where a New Yorker could find duck legs for sale or trade and finally ascertained that the Fairway on the Upper West Side was the place. I've always found the Fairway to be overly crowded and kind of overwhelming, so I avoided it for quite some time. But, yesterday I was on my way to Zabar's anyways, and I walked right by it. So, I turned around and went back in.

I was not convinced that the Fairway really had duck legs - after all, I'd been misled before, but I asked the butcher and he pointed to the wall, next to the turkey necks and chicken gizzards, and there they were.


I brought them home and finally got to try this recipe. Here it is:

Braised Duck Legs for Idiots, adapted from The Amateur Gourmet (You're welcome to click the link above and use that recipe as well - but I'm writing it out in case you don't want to)

4 duck legs
1 knob of ginger
1 onion
1 stalk celery
1 carrot
canola oil (or some other light flavored oil - not olive)
soy sauce
scallions - I used three
salt
Chinese 5 spice powder
cooked rice (to serve with the meal)

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees.

2. Chop up your onion, celery, carrot and ginger (peel the ginger first, otherwise it will be gross).


3. Put the duck legs on top and sprinkle with salt and Chinese Five Spice powder.


4. Put in the oven for two hours (or so the recipe says).

Interjection - I checked the food at and hour and forty five minutes and the duck legs were done - here they are:

- but the veggies were burning! I felt pretty annoyed. I've been waiting to make this recipe for months! Argh! I considered throwing them out, but they still tasted kinda good and crispy, so I left them. Looking back, I think I just needed more of them. My onion was kind of small, so maybe that had something to do with it. Anyhow, here they are:


(I might not have been so mad if I haven't been trying to do my taxes all day with varying degrees of success. That probably added to it - but back to the recipe)

5. (Oh! And then pour off the excess fat from the pan. There's gonna be a LOT of fat and that's bad. I forgot that part and I went back and added it just for you.) Pull the skin off the duck legs. Here's my naked duck legs:


Now here's the skin I pulled off (minus the bits that Miriam ate):


You probably should just throw this away. I'm not sure why I took a picture of it.

6. Shred the meat from the bones, put it back in the pot with the veggies, throw in some chopped scallions (I used the white part and a bit of the green part too for color), then add some soy sauce until it tastes good to you (I used tamari, which is kind of aged soy sauce - I didn't have the regular kind).


7. Put it in a bowl over some cooked rice (I made brown, because it's healthy) and serve.


It tasted really good even with the burned veggies. Miriam says they weren't burned, they were deep fried. And delicious. So that's good enough for me.