This week, I had some colleagues up from NYC and, in addition to working hard, we had a lovely dinner at an Italian steakhouse. Being somewhat contrarian, I ordered the duck. It was fantastic, but HUGE!!! The menu said it was half a duck, but I didn’t connect that that meant they’d serve me HALF A DUCK. It was as big as my face!! Needless to say, I went home with at least a . . . → Read More: 15-Minute Mu Shu Duck for One]]>

This week, I had some colleagues up from NYC and, in addition to working hard, we had a lovely dinner at an Italian steakhouse. Being somewhat contrarian, I ordered the duck. It was fantastic, but HUGE!!! The menu said it was half a duck, but I didn’t connect that that meant they’d serve me HALF A DUCK. It was as big as my face!! Needless to say, I went home with at least a quarter of a duck in a paper bag. Now today, I have a craving for Chinese food, but a refrigerator full of leftovers. I also have about 20 minutes in between conference calls, one egg, some milk, flour, and cabbage…of course, cabbage. Think think think… I once made a cheater’s mu shu chicken with rotisserie chicken, cole slaw mix, and tortillas, so that seemed like a good start.

I know you won’t all have a bag of deliciously cooked duck sitting in your refrigerator, but this fake mu shu technique will work with almost any meaty leftovers.

Lunch is done. Time for another conference call!

So sorry for the bad cell phone photos. I was hungry, Erik wasn’t around, and I needed to get back to work, so I prioritized speed over quality.

Fast and Fake Mu Shu Duck

Makes 1 serving

Directions

1. Slice up the cabbage and toss it in a 10-inch cast iron skillet over medium heat with a little olive oil.
2. While the cabbage is sauteing, chop up your cooked, leftover meat into bite-sized pieces.
3. Add the meat to the skillet with the cabbage and cook until the meat is hot and the cabbage is tender.
4. While the cabbage/meat filling is cooking, whisk up the egg, milk, and flour to make the crepe batter.

   

5. Once the filling is done, remove it from the pan into a bowl and put the pan back on the heat.
6. Pour about half the crepe batter into the hot pan, swirling it around so that the batter evenly coats the bottom of the pan.

   

7. Cook the crepe for about a minute, or until the edges start to brown and curl off the pan. Carefully use a butter knife to loosen it from the pan. If it sticks, let it cook for another 10 seconds or so. Once the crepe releases easily from the pan, work the knife under the middle of the crepe, lift it up, and lay the uncooked side down on the pan.

   

8. Let the second side cook for about 30 seconds and repeat with the remaining batter.
9. Mix a teaspoon or so of Hoisin sauce into the filling. Top a crepe with filling and fold it up.

If you want to make more than a single serving of crepes, you can easily increase the batter. The Ratio for crepes is 1 part liquid to 1 part egg to 1/2 part flour (by weight). Since an egg is usually about 2 ounces, decide how many eggs to use and scale accordingly.

Sorry that we’ve been MIA. My cousin got married this weekend (Congrats, Peter and Holly!!) so we’ve been busy with travel and seeing family. We’ll have a few local Minnesota posts this week – we’re going to a local food restaurant in Minneapolis tonight and hopefully picking some chokecherries at the cabin in a couple of days. First, a salad that we made last week that blew us away.

I found this recipe in . . . → Read More: Green Bean Salad with Crispy Duck]]>

Sorry that we’ve been MIA. My cousin got married this weekend (Congrats, Peter and Holly!!) so we’ve been busy with travel and seeing family. We’ll have a few local Minnesota posts this week – we’re going to a local food restaurant in Minneapolis tonight and hopefully picking some chokecherries at the cabin in a couple of days. First, a salad that we made last week that blew us away.

I found this recipe in the New York Times about a year ago, but never got around to making it. Every time I flipped through my recipes,though, it caught my eye, so I finally pulled it out and put it on the list. We made a few of our standard tweaks – doubling the veggies and streamlining some of the prep – and then devoured it. There are enough green beans to make it feel like a salad, but the duck and honeyed almonds make it a treat.

If you’re afraid of the thick layer of fat on the duck, you can trim it off after you cook it, if you absolutely have to. Just don’t cut it off before it’s cooked, because it bastes the meat and is used in the dressing. I think you should live a little and eat the fat. Then go for a run or haul some food home from the farmer’s market.

Green Bean Salad with Crispy Duck
Serves 4

Directions

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees. Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment paper. If you don’t have parchment paper, you can try heavily greasing the baking sheet, but I’m not taking responsibility for anything sticking to it.
2. Microwave the honey for 10-20 seconds in a glass or ceramic bowl until it is very runny.
3. Add the small pinch of salt and almonds and mix until coated. Add the brown sugar and toss to coat the almonds.
4. Spread the almonds in a single layer on the baking sheet and cook bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until dark golden brown. Stir about halfway through and check on them before you think you need to. They have a tendency to go from perfect to burned in a flash. Let them cool while you prep the rest of the ingredients.

   

5. Raise the oven temperature to 400 degrees.
6. In a small bowl, mix the salt, chili powder, black pepper, cumin, and cinnamon.
7. Put a 10-inch cast iron skillet (or other oven-safe pan) on the stove and add 1 tsp of olive oil. Don’t turn on the stove. This is just to get you set up so that you don’t have to use your duck-y hands to get out the pan.
8. Score the duck fat in a crosshatch pattern. Try to just cut the fat, not the meat, but don’t get too fussy. I definitely cut into the meat and it still tasted great.

   

9. Rub the salt mixture all over the duck, really working it into the fat.

   

10. Turn the stove to medium-low and let the pan heat for a minute or so, until you can feel the heat with your hand a couple of inches off the surface.
11. Put the duck in the pan, fat side down. Sear for about 10 minutes without moving. In the words of my culinary/science geek hero, Alton Brown, just walk away! If it smells like burning, turn the heat down a little. At the end, say around minute 8, you can take a peek. If it looks nice and dark brown, flip it over. If not, let it cook for a few more minutes. Cook on the other side for just a minute.
12. While the duck cooks on the first side, put a large pot of water on the stove to boil. Add a good pinch of salt. Set out a bowl of cold water and float an ice pack in it. If you keep ice in your freezer, you can use 10 or so ice cubes instead of the ice pack, but we rarely have ice hanging around.
13. While the water is heating up, snap the ends off the green beans. You can cut off the ends, too, if you’d rather. Snap/cut any in half that are longer than you’d like in your salad.
14. Once the water is boiling, drop about half the beans in and let them cook for 2 minutes (thin beans) to 4 minutes (thick beans). After the allotted time, fish the beans out with a slotted spoon or tongs and drop them into the bowl of ice water. This will stop the cooking, so that you have bright green, crisp tender beans. Repeat with the rest of the beans.
15. Once the duck has cooked in the second side for one minute, put it in the oven (on the same pan) and cook for about 4 more minutes. The USDA recommends cooking duck to an internal temperature of 165 degrees, so now is a good time to get our your probe thermometerif you have one. Take the duck out of the oven and let it rest.

    

16. While the duck is in the oven, smush up the garlic until it forms a paste. You can use a pinch of salt to make this easier. Either a mortar and pestle or the side of a knife work pretty well. You do this to avoid big chunks of garlic in the salad. Put the garlic paste in a large bowl and add the lime juice. Whisk in the remaining 2 TBsp of olive oil.
17. Add the green beans and watercress to the large bowl and toss to coat with the lime-garlic dressing.
18. Cut the two duck breasts apart and slice each into about 8 diagonal slices.

    

19. Put a pile of green beans and watercress on each plate. Top it with 4 slices of duck and a shower of honeyed almonds (break up any big chunks). Eat!

This salad keeps well for at least a day. I didn’t heat up the duck at all when I ate it for lunch the next day…just let it sit out for a bit so that it wasn’t refrigerator-cold. Erik microwaved the duck for 30 or 40 seconds before putting it all together. We were both pleased with our techniques.

Our food storage situation was getting out of control. Half a duck fell out of the freezer and landed on my shoe-less toes. Random bags of grains leftover from this fall made getting the breakfast granola a daily battle. And somehow we had a whole shopping bag full of mushrooms in the refrigerator. Time to take charge!!

We sautéed two chopped onions (Paffenroth Gardens) with some garlic (Keith’s Farm) in sunflower oil (Stolor Organics). . . . → Read More: Dark Days: Attacking Food Storage Clutter]]>

Our food storage situation was getting out of control. Half a duck fell out of the freezer and landed on my shoe-less toes. Random bags of grains leftover from this fall made getting the breakfast granola a daily battle. And somehow we had a whole shopping bag full of mushrooms in the refrigerator. Time to take charge!!

We sautéed two chopped onions (Paffenroth Gardens) with some garlic (Keith’s Farm) in sunflower oil (Stolor Organics). To that, we added a mountain of sliced mushrooms (Bulich Mushroom Farm) and sautéed them until soft with a little salt and pepper and a splash of Riesling (Chateau Renaissance). Then poured everything into the slow cooker.

We trimmed any excess fat and skin off of the duck parts (Hudson Valley Duck Farm) and used the same pan to brown them for a few minutes on each side (just until the duck released easily from the pan). Into the slow cooker it went, topped off by small handfull of farro (Cayuga Pure Organics), a few red sunchokes and a couple of handfulls of little potatoes (Berried Treasures) and covered in water.

We let it cook on high for six hours. We then removed the bones, shredded the meat, and returned it to the slow cooker for another two hours on low.

Served up with some (failed and very flat, but tasty) sourdough bread (flour from Cayuga Pure Organics, yeast from the Manhattan air) it was a very satisfying improvisation.

On Saturday night we threw a party for some friends and needed to find a solid anchor for the menu, something that would stand up to the punch (and help our friends stand up to the punch). With the lousy weather we wanted something warm and inviting that is filling and can be prepared well in advance. Enter cassoulet!

Cassoulet is a slow-cooked meat and bean stew. . . . → Read More: How to Make Cassoulet in a Slow Cooker]]>
Local pinto beans from Cayuga Pure Organics

On Saturday night we threw a party for some friends and needed to find a solid anchor for the menu, something that would stand up to the punch (and help our friends stand up to the punch). With the lousy weather we wanted something warm and inviting that is filling and can be prepared well in advance. Enter cassoulet!

Cassoulet is a slow-cooked meat and bean stew. It’s traditional French peasant food. It was perfect. After about 2 hours of prep (1 hour if you have someone else butcher the duck), we put the slow cooker on “set it and forget it” mode and lifted the lid off when our friends showed up at 6:00. Thanks to the slow cooker, it was still warm (and even tastier) at 11 pm. Another winner from Art of the Slow Cooker.

This post is further proof that “we are not vegetarians“. We have purchased and cooked more meat in the past ten days than in the prior three months, so we’ve probably brought our annual diet closer to omnivorous. Last week’s list included three types of sausage and a duck. A whole duck. But we also bought pinto beans that turned into the most delicious, creamy perfection in this dish, so it’s not all about the meat. Plus, thanks to the extensiveness of the Union Square greenmarket, the entire dish was made with high-quality, local ingredients, so we know the pig, duck, and lamb were treated well and fed appropriately.

Feel free to mess around with the ingredients, keeping the proportions roughly similar.

Slow Cooker Cassoulet
Adapted from Art of the Slow Cooker
Serves 12

Ingredients:

Directions:

1. Remove all visible fat and skin from the duck using a pair of sharp (and washable) scissors and put into a 12-inch cast iron skillet over medium heat. Cook the fat and skin until they are almost crispy and most of the fat has rendered out. Discard any remaining pieces.
2. While the fat is cooking, season the duck liberally with salt and pepper on all sides.

   

3. Put the duck pieces in the hot pan, skin side down, and cook until nicely brown, about 4 minutes. Flip and brown the other side, again for about 4 minutes.

   

4. While the duck is browning, cut the lamb into cubes and season all over with salt and pepper.
5. After the duck has browned, set it aside in a baking pan to catch the drips. Add the lamb to the pan and brown, stirring occasionally, for about 8 minutes. Remove and add to the baking pan with with duck.

   

6. After the lamb has browned, add both types of sausages and brown, stirring occasionally, for about 6 minutes. Remove and add to the baking pan with the duck and lamb.

   

7. Use a spoon to remove all but about a tablespoon of the fat in the pan. You can also pour this out into a heat-safe container, but be very careful not to let it drip down the side of the pan, because it could start a fire.
8. Add the onion to the skillet and sauté until lightly browned, about 4 minutes.

   

9. Add the garlic, nutmeg, Italian seasoning, and cloves. Cook for a minute until it starts to smell good.
10. Add the wine and scrape the tasty bits off the bottom of the pan while it comes to a boil.
11. Crush the tomatoes with your hands and add them to the pan with the tomato liquid and broth. Bring to a boil.

    

12. While the liquid is coming to a boil, layer the meat and beans in your slow cooker. Beans, meat, beans, meat, beans.

    

    

13. Once the liquid has come to a boil, pour it over the beans and meat in the slow cooker, put on the lid, and cook on low for 8 to 10 hours.

    

Sorry that there isn’t a picture of the final product. We were so busy with the party (and so excited to eat it) that we forgot to take a photo!

Of all of the pictures that we could find online of other bloggers’ cassoulet, Cathy Shambley’s looks the most like ours did. Our beans were brown instead of the traditional white because we used local Pinto beans, but otherwise they look remarkably similar. (If you Google “cassoulet” and go to “Images”, it is surprising how different the final dish can look.)

Cathy’s recipe is definitely a departure from ours. Hers is more traditional, and she made it using her own duck confit. We did not make a confit. We also swapped out some traditional ingredients with local ingredients, and we made it in a slow cooker. but, whatever path you want to take to get there, definitely make yourself some cassoulet!