Not another duck and orange recipe ;)

Snow here for the third day in a row. Lovely. Especially now it's sunny. Light has such a cheering quality: Monday was Candlemas, we're more than half way to the equinox, every day there's more light, and suddenly I have more energy.

This was the dinner Lettice cooked last night when her friend Lucy came to stay. Tomorrow Lettice is off to South Africa, the next day Lucy's off to Central America.

Duck and orange
for four

4 duck breasts (with skin)
1/2 mug fresh orange juice (2-3 oranges)
1/4 mug soy sauce
2 glugs of oil
2 tbsp runny honey
1 tbsp white wine vinegar
zest of an orange (do this BEFORE you juice the orange)

Score the duck skin both ways so that you have a diamond pattern. Whisk everything together in a large bowl, then add the duck. Leave as long as possible - up to 24 hrs, although ours was fine after 2-3 hours.

Shake the duck dry, then fry vigorously skin side down for five minutes (watch carefully at this point, because the skin burns very easily). Drain off the fat (do NOT pour this down the sink, because it will block your drains). Cook skin side down for another five minutes or so, but at a lower heat. Drain again, then turn the meat and turn the heat right down. They need 15-20 minutes in total (it's hard to say exactly, it will depend on size, heat, and whether they were at room temperature when you began). Rest on a hot plate while you make the sauce.

Drain any fat from the pan. Put the pan back on the heat and de-glaze with some wine, a little stock, water if you don't have anything else. Add the marinade, bring to the boil, then keep it bubbling for a good five minutes.

Slice the meat across the grain. Strain the sauce into a jug (this is easy only if you have a small conical sieve; if you don't, and most people don't, then try not to mind about any stray bits at the bottom, they're probably delicious anyway).

PS this is based on Keith Abel's recipe in Cooking Outside the Box

Crispy duck

I'm a little embarrassed by the size of the EASY tag in my Technorati tag cloud ... it's almost as if I don't like cooking. No, the truth is that I don't like food that's too mucked about, I don't care to muck about with food, and I'm not into prissy presentation. I do a lot of cooking, I love it, but there are other things to do too.

This one's easy. Delicious. It's from Nigella Express, but you need to mess with it a little, because some of her instructions don't work. No need for fancy presentation - just put it on your largest serving dish, and plonk it on the table. Mmm

You can tell Nigella had trouble with this recipe: she gives two versions - the first takes five and a half hours in a slow oven, the second is speeded up a little. Nice to know that even tv cooks get their timings wrong. But actually, it only needs four hours. Apart from thinking ahead, the cook has nothing to do other than put the duck in the oven.

Duck is a fatty meat. This slow-cooking renders the fat out of the bird, taking with it some of the richness. You need the fruitiness of the plum sauce (Europeans use orange for a similar effect), the crunch of cucumber, and the tang of onions. All the spring onions in the shops at the moment are grown in places like Egypt and Morocco, and I can only imagine that they are air-freighted as they don't have a long shelf-life. So I used the greens sprouting from a couple of onions at the bottom of my allium basket. Finely chopped shallot would probably do just as well.

The rendered fat went to the dogs and cats, spread over several days. I made a strong stock with the giblets, so we had a very good risotto last night - and the dogs got the cooked giblets.

Crispy duck
for 4-6

1 duck
cucumber sticks
spring onions, slivered
Hoisin sauce in a jar
Chinese pancakes - allow 3 or 4 each


Preheat the oven to 170C

Cut off the fatty flap which hangs over the cavity. Put the bird on a rack in a deep roasting tin. Roast for four hours. That's it.

There's no need to give it a half-hour burst of heat at the end, as Nigella suggests in the speeded-up version, nor is there any need to roast the bird at the low heat for five and a half hours. It was definitely ready after four hours, but didn't look as if it would have spoilt with another hour in the oven.

Shred the duck with a fork onto a large hot serving dish, and put on the table alongside pancakes, saladings and Hoisin, letting everyone roll their own. Fabulous for a party ... just add another bird or two.

Related posts

Duck and delicious potatoes
Chairman Mao's braised red pork
Chairman Mao's braised red pork revisited
Char sui and noodles

Duck and delicious potatoes

Not much blogging going on here ... I've felt daunted by the weight of photographs which need sorting out since we got back from holiday, and also I haven't felt much like cooking. They don't much care for eating here - well, they don't really notice what they eat, unless it's pointed out to them, and then they're polite. So this evening, they were very polite, as they know I took a few pains with dinner. But then, before the last mouthful is eaten ... they switch on the radio to hear the latest on the cricket. Do I feel demoralised? Well, yes, on one level. But on another ... ladies and gentlemen, I give you ....

Duck and delicious potatoes. This is for 4 (both the girls are away)

Potato gratin with thyme and tomato

The potatoes are cooked in the oven, and they don't have any liquid or anything to cover them. I was panicking that they would dry out, the top layer would curl up and they would taste disgusting and dry. But no ... this is a piece of magic, a potato gratin dish with no calorific / fatty sauce, just the fresh and vibrant taste of its
four (yes, four) ingredients.

This recipe is adapted (that is to say, I forgot the main flavouring ingredient!) from a book I bought in the Oxfam shop in the Turl, Oxford, this afternoon, Under the Sun, by Caroline Conran. You know how they say most recipe books are kept for only one recipe? This is it - the rest is in every French cookery book I already own (lots and lots!). Just bear in mind that I left out the juniper.

450g onions
450g tomatoes
700g potatoes
1 large sprig of thyme
(6 juniper berries)
olive oil

Peel and slice the onions, and sweat them slowly in olive oil for about half an hour, until they are soft and just starting to turn golden. This should take 20-30 minutes.

When the onions are nearly cooked, peel the potatoes, and slice them very thinly, preferably with a mandolin (I bought one earlier this year, and although I don't use it very often, when I do use it, nothing else will do - and it's opened up a whole new avenue of cookery that was previously unavailable to me because I couldn't/couldn't be bothered to prepare food so meticulously. Mix them well in a little olive oil. Salt, too, if you use it.

Tomatoes - I used some of the tomatoes I've been slow roasting for the last week, just snipped a few into the layers. If you haven't been doing this (and I wouldn't blame you in the least, although it's pretty effortless and very delicious), then slice some tomatoes thickly and soften them in a frying pan with a little olive oil.

Layer the vegetables, starting and ending with potatoes, and snipping some thyme into the mix. Caroline Conran says to put a bay leaf in, but it didn't add any flavour, and just had to be fished out of the finished dish, so I wouldn't bother next time. (Btw, the bay is the green thing in the photograph that looks as if it might be a mange tout pea that's been accidentally dropped onto the wrong dish.) I forgot to put in the juniper (crushed in a mortar), and I plan to do that next time (Sunday, when we're 10 for dinner ... this was a dry run, because I panicked unnecessarily about the lack of liquid).

Put this, uncovered (see why I panicked?) in a moderate oven, ie 170C / gas mark 3 for one hour.

Duck ... grilled duck, because this is my one and only entry for Heart of the Matter's August theme - grilling - which ends today, and which I am rounding up. You should see my face, very red and embarrassed ... I've been away, it's been raining, I don't really do grilling (I know, Ilva was shocked, too!).

This is a way to render most of the fat off a duck breast, so that you can eat it even if you are following a low cholesterol diet. Just try very hard not to eat the skin, even though it no longer has much fat.

Heat a griddle pan until it's nearly smoking. Put your duck breasts on it skin side down. Cook them for 10 minutes without turning, pouring off the fat which is rendered once or twice during cooking (otherwise you'll have a nasty mess all over your cooker). When the 10 minutes are up, turn the breasts, then put them in a hot oven for eight minutes. Then take them out of the oven and leave to stand for 10 minutes.

In the meantime make a sauce. This one's good: mix 2 tbsp olive oil with 2 tbsp hoi sin and 1 tbsp honey, together with a splash of Marsala or Madeira.

Serve on hot plates. We had a beetroot salad with this ... made with those precooked vacuum-wrapped beets, dressed in olive oil, wine vinegar and plenty of Maldon salt.

This is my entry for HotM, the round-up will appear in the next few days - and then I promise I'll make every single one of the entries as long as the sunshine holds out before winter sets in.