The main dish of Easter 2018 was duck. It was J's idea and worked very well! Actually it wasn't for Easter but the eve of Easter. We invited J's parents here on the Saturday to celebrate the spring holiday together a day early.
We served luncheon before the dinner. I made two kinds of sandwiches: egg salad & cucumber and smoked salmon & tarragon-flavored avocado spread.
J's mother brought beautiful vegetable platter with her homemade artichoke and kale dip. The dip was full with flavors from cheese, bacon and harissa. I guess there were other secret ingredients that J's mother combined with artistically. Delicious!
The luncheon was light and very nice. Then, I disappeared into the kitchen. Cooking duck breast has been puzzling me. The low-temperature oven method that I adapted
last time didn't fully convince me after all. This time I went back to the
cold-pan method. I cooked two duck breasts in Dutch oven on the stove, between medium-low and low heat, pouring out rendering fat frequently during the cooking. According to my blog, it took about 25 minutes last time. This time it took almost one hour to reach internal temperature to 125F during the fat-side-down cooking. After I flipped the breasts to cook the red meat side, it took another 10 minutes or so to reach 130F for medium-rare. In fact, the internal temperature varied within a single duck breast, which scared me because I didn't want to cook too much since J's family prefers rare. Medium-rare was my goal so that I who don't eat rare could have end-pieces that were better cooked to medium while I could serve less cooked parts in the middle to the rest of people. Everyone would be happy. Well, the result was who knows. I personally enjoyed the duck. That was a clear sign that my duck was well-cooked. J kindly said the duck looked nice, though.
For the tricky pan-seared duck, I made red wine sauce by adapting a
recipe by Josh Eggleton that I found online. The recipe called for 20 ml of red wine, 50 ml of red wine vinegar, and 100 ml of port along with other several ingredients. I skipped the tiny amount of red wine since there was no red wine open in this house. Instead I used more red wine vinegar. J bought a new bottle of port for this sauce, which was very fruity. I added 20 ml of port to bright up the well-simmered sauce just before serving.
The side was fondant potatoes, roasted asparagus and braised green-topped fresh carrots. I lived the result of fondant potatoes very much. They would become one of our staple sides. Plus, spring greens, three colored mini tomatoes, fennel, and navel orange with orange-lemon vinaigrette. I was happy with all of them until I realized I had forgotten to add fresh mint in the salad. Oh, well, the salad was pretty refreshing without mint.
There was another kind of duck to be served. When we did grocery shopping, we found only two duck breasts at the store. Two could be enough for four of us, but we wanted to make sure that there would be enough food (duck). There were some smoked duck breasts at the store. So, we grabbed two of them in case. The smoked duck was ready-to-eat: slice and serve with dijon mustard and cornichons at room temperature.
Two kinds of duck and a lot of veggies seemed to make everyone satisfied. At least I was very happy with the dinner. Desserts? Yes, of course. To be continued...
