Roast duck stuffed with apples and sausage
When I was thinking about ideas for tonight's dinner, I thumbed through Julia Child's "MtAoFC" with Dave, who picked Caneton rôti à l'Alsacienne: roast duck stuffed with apples and pork sausage. Good pick, Dave. Good pick.
Finding the duck was kind of a challenge, but it turns out that Whole Foods carries frozen duck. Excellent. I thawed it for a few days. Next time I'll probably brine it, too.
A few hours ahead of time, you sauté some pork sausage I also got this from Whole Foods because it's one of the few places I know that you can get non-seedy sausage by the pound. After the sausage is lightly browned, take it out and sauté apple slices in the fat. There wasn't much fat to go on, so I just browned them until they were soft.
When all the apples are done and removed from the pan, you add beef stock and port wine and scrape up the drippings and brown bits in the pan. While that is reducing, you soak the apples in Cognac, sugar, salt, and cinnamon. When the port / stock mixture is reduced, pour it over the sausage. When both types of booze are all soaked up, you mix it together.
This is the duck stuffing, and yes, there are TWO types of booze in my duck stuffing.
At this point, I realized the time had come to clean out the cavity of the duck. In this case, that just meant taking out the neck and a couple of innards I couldn't identify. The neck was really long and scary, and I was afraid there would be a head attached. I think I said out loud, "If they shoved this duck's whole head and neck up its own ass, I'm going to scream."
Anyway, I'm going to use all of this - the neck, giblets, and carcass - to make a duck stock. That's right. Mmm.
So I stuffed the duck, tied it together, and put it in a pan with some carrots, onions, and extra apples. Prick the skin of the thighs and breasts, and roast.
Ohhhhh man. The whole house smelled amazing. Dave was good enough to carve the duck and de-stuff it, so we had a nice platter of duck cutlets, duck legs, cooked apples, pork sausage, vegetables, and juices.
Trés bien.
Aside from making the duck stock, we also have a little extra meat that I'm going to use tomorrow to make a green salad with some duck sprinkled on. I got the idea from Ina!
Buttered spinach
It's spring and I'm getting really into Julia's recipes for spinach. This one is épinards étuvés au beurre: spinach braised in butter. I had wanted to make a sauce mornay (cheese sauce) for the spinach, but that involves baking the finished spinach for 30 minutes, and I just didn't have enough time today.
Prepare spinach like I did the other day - snip all the stems off (and feed to bunny), briefly boil, drain & chill, then squeeze out cooking liquid. (I have saved the liquid from both spinach batches to use as a vegetable stock for some barley salad. Look at me go.) This is basically what is done to prepare spinach for freezing, although this is far superior to using frozen.
After you sauté the spinach briefly to evaporate whatever liquid you didn't manage to squeeze out, you add in a bit of butter (and I added some extra cream, too) and braise for 15 minutes.
This spinach was very good; it was like creamed spinach, except for more of a buttery taste than the dairy taste, but honestly it was almost the same.
Next time I'm making the sauce mornay, which I think would be amazing. I haven't tried Julia's sauce recipes yet, and I'm kind of scared, but I can do it.
My friend brought a delicious apple crisp and vanilla bean ice cream, which was a fantastic accompaniment to the apple-stuffed duck. Somehow I have managed to stay awake, although I am ready to pass out from such a decadent and tasty meal. Fantastique.
No comments:
Post a Comment