Great Cooking

I like to cook. I have always liked to cook from my earliest memories until now. I made my first family dinner when I was about 11 but I had been experimenting with food before that. Most of my very early memories involve food including the cheese and bread meals my family ate in Heidelberg when I was under the age of 5. I liked stinky cheese and pickles and good dark bread even then.

So tonight my husband and I had our second round of Mark Vetri's duck bolognese. Since here in Pennsylvania it is just the two of us, some stuff gets frozen to reappear and this was one of those. But that wasn't the only reappearance in this recipe. Vetri's recipe calls for 4 pounds of duck meat but in my local market I have a choice of duck breast or whole duck. Since one duck breast costs about the same as a whole duck I bought the whole duck. This is about the time that Shakespeare ran through my mind. The whole "for want of a nail a shoe was lost" but in reverse was my new predicament. I didn't need to make the massive amount of sauce that the recipe made, but I did need enough duck meat from the duck to make approximately half. But that left a lot of duck.

So I began to research a variety of ideas. I already knew I liked duck confit and I only needed one of the duck leg and thigh combinations for the bolognese, but in order to make confit appropriately I needed more duck fat than I had on hand. So I looked up how to render the fat on this duck. In some ways that turned out to be the most fun. When my husband and I went to Toulouse, we went to this popular restaurant a couple of times because we really liked their salad with the delices du canard. So I had all these innards from the duck--gizzard, heart, liver-- and I could turn them in to confited morsels. On top of that, the recipe I found for rendering the duck fat turned out the best duck treats of all--crispy and delicious morsels of duck fat thoroughly cooked to absolute crispness. And I ended up with the "delices" the crisp bits, and a variety of confited duck meat that we are going to use for cassoulet.

On top of that we had Vetri's duck bolognese which is seriously delicious. Cooking is so much fun.