Les Organes de Canard sont Bruts!

In my quest for the elusive roast that Jen desired upon returning from Salt Lake City I also entertained the idea of doing a roast duck. Generally when someone says "a roast" I don't think of duck. I primarily envision beef with pork as a possible alternative. Even lamb doesn't usually seem like it would fall under the categorization of "a roast" but I think you could make a case for it.

Also, Jen just never wants to have duck. She always thinks she doesn't like it but after she has it she's usually glad that she did. It's kind of the same way she feels about watching Curb Your Enthusiasm or, for that matter, any movie ever made.



Needless to say, duck was on the menu this evening. Before the duck I made a salad with kale, segmented blood oranges, pomegranate, red onion, a little lemon juice, olive oil, salt, and pepper.



For the duck I cooked it for about two hours in a roasting pan with half of a sweet potato (leftover from Jen's couscous last week) and the remaining red onion I hadn't used in the salad. I also quartered a blood orange and put it in the cavity of the duck.



In the past when I have made duck I've gone out of my way not to incorporate orange. My past self's snootiness lead him to believe that this was trite, overdone, played out. However, using my current theory of cooking, I figure that if it's done so often it must be for a reason. I wouldn't intentionally avoid pairing basil with tomato because I perceived it as hackneyed when the result would clearly be more favorable than omitting the ingredient all together!

It would be like not putting jelly on a peanut butter sandwich. Unless you are Jen who thinks that is an abomination. But that's because she has terrible taste in peanut butter sandwiches and is un-American.



I had tossed in the organ meats with some sweet potato and red onion and I served that whole mixture up on the side along with the blood oranges from inside the duck. The sad thing is I really don't like organ meat. I like the idea of organ meat but I just can never bring myself to actually eat it. Well, that's not entirely true. I have tried them on several occasions and each time I have found them to be less than enjoyable. However, the flavoring they can give in a nice one-pan roast such as this is very nice. So it was that we ate around the organs and discarded them when we were done.

Somewhere there is an elderly Frenchman who is filled with an indescribably horror and he doesn't quite know why.



As another accompaniment I took some of Jen's cranberry bread from the freezer. She really disliked this bread because it had come out too savory and not sweet enough. Well, using the technique I employed earlier to save her ill-fated buttermilk bread I griddled some slices of this bread up and served them.

I used the notion that cranberries are also a good accompaniment for duck. Of course I learned most of what I know about cooking in the 1990's when cranberries were considered a good accompaniment for just about everything.

For more information watch the following video:





For beer I had yet another Belgian-style beer. This one was from Cisco Warning: their website will alert you that it has adult content. I guess some information about beer is what they're talking about. Don't be alarmed.

This beer was quite good (as are all Cisco's beers) and I learned that it's named after the nickname for Nantucket because it is often covered in fog. Funny, I grew up in Rhode Island and we always just called it Nantucket.

Then again, we also referred to milkshakes as 'cabinets' so we are not to be trusted.