Anniversary Duck

Mary and I were married on September 21, 1991, a decidedly autumnal day,  in the front yard of her mom and step-dad's house on the east river road in Minneapolis.  So our 21st anniversary--which is, what?, sort of a numerological golden anniversary?--came around this past Friday.  Contingencies of our schedules and a hurried harvest to get three wheelbarrows-full of squash out of the cold before a really hard frost meant that we didn't sit down to a properly celebratory dinner until last night.  We grilled a duck, and served it with celery root-potato purée, and chanterelles and greens (turnip and kale) cooked down in the duck's pan juices; and it was splendid.

The duck was from Bar 5 at the Minneapolis Farmers Market, and it was the perfect size for two avid duck eaters.  I cut the duck up, yep, cut the duck up into leg-thigh portions and the whole breast on the bone.  Wings and carcass were chopped and went to making duck stock.  The excess skin I sliced and put in a baking dish with water to cover, and that went into the oven to render out fat while I was cooking down a roaster pan full of oven tomatoes to freeze.

About grilling duck:  Duck being among the fattiest of meats, to grill it with that luscious skin on presents certain challenges.  Basically, you have to act as a human rotisserie:  you can never leave the grill, and as The Byrds implored us, you must turn, turn, turn.  Just a few seconds' inattention can result in a vicious flare-up that will ruin your beautiful bird.  You want a medium-hot fire for this, a good deal cooler than you would use to cook a steak or chop that only needs four or five minutes on a side, but you need a good bed of coals, too, for the duck is going to be on there for, oh, a good 15 to 20 minutes, I'd say.  I wasn't timing it; meat cookery is all about looking, touching, smelling, very little about numbers, especially when grilling.

Use the duck to prop itself up in the various postures required to brown it evenly and deeply, all around.  It won't be quite done at this point, so we use the "iron on the fire" trick of bunging it in a cast-iron skillet to finish cooking.  As I've said before, this has the added benefit of creating pan juices in which to cook the mushrooms and greens (this was such a marvelous meal, I'm getting nostalgic thinking about it, even though we ate it just last night...).

And now about those chanterelles:  I've had them in the spare fridge downstairs for two months!  I had practically forgotten about them, and then when I remembered them, I was afraid to look, fearing they would be a deliquescent pool of fungal glop.  No, indeed!  I was stunned to see what excellent condition they were in.  You could have shipped them off to market, and no one would have been the wiser (which makes me think that the chanterelles I've seen in markets in France and the Pacific northwest might indeed have been around the block a few times).  Once they warmed up they even recovered a good deal of their haunting aroma.  Fabulous.

I had two fires going to facilitate the start and the finish cooking, but by the time the duck was well browned, dark had come down, and with it a piercing chill, so we moved operations inside.  All that good, smoky grill flavor came in with the duck, anyway.  In a low oven (275, I think) we cooked the duck and chanterelles together for a while, and then removed the 'shrooms and breast, added a mess of kale and turnip greens, a ladle of rich duck stock.  The greens and legs cooked together for around 15 minutes.  Then I cranked the heat up to 425, returned the breast and chanterelles to the pan, and roasted it until the duck skin was sizzling again, and the pan juices had reduced.  After serving it all out onto plates I deglazed the pan with more stock, a splash of the wine ('08 Gigondas) we were drinking with dinner, and a wee pat of butter.

The duck was superb, and I give most of the credit for that to the bird itself, though I did do a good job cooking it.  The leg meat came off the bone almost like confit; the breast, though cooked well past the rosé stage I would look for in a magret, was also tender and flavorful.  The skin was a treat, crisp and a bit chewy, well rendered of fat.  A lot of fancy French chefs say that their philosophy of cooking is based on how their mothers and grandmothers cooked--cuisine de maman--though if you looked at their elaborate plates, you'd be hard pressed to guess that.  This dinner reminded us of that approach (it's not that we only have one mind between us, but we both expressed the same thought).  While this was not a meal of Michelin-level fussiness, it did represent a preparation that elevated humble ingredients to an ethereal height.

Duck, chanterelles, humble ingredients?  Well, yes.  In many parts of the world duck is more common, and much cheaper, than chicken, and the chanterelles, well, they're just some grubby fungi I found on the dirty forest floor.  Pot greens?  Doesn't get much humbler than that.  Many people would turn their noses up at food like this; yes, I know, you're not those people, not at all.

So, it was a happy anniversary to us.  And that celery root-potato purée?  Every time I make it, we swoon.  The recipe may be here in the blog somewhere, but it's definitely in the book, and worth the $27.95 all on its own.


Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Here's an idea...

...for an extremely delicious, simple, seasonal weekend supper, even if it ain't all local:  grilled or pan-roasted Copper River sockeye salmon on a bed of (grilled or roasted) greens (here daikon flowers, yeah, who knew...?), roasted baby beets, green garlic-tarragon mayo.

I went fishing this week and last and encountered amazing, complex mayfly hatches, and fish churning up the water in their bug-eating fervor, just a stunning phenomenon to behold.  As far as the catching went, I got schooled by the fishes.  The trout can become incredibly selective in the midst of hatches like this, and therefore difficult to fool.  I caught a few fish, but brought nothing home.  Oh, well.

The upside of this is that if I had brown trout in the creel I probably wouldn't have gone shopping for salmon, and the wild Copper River sockeye that's in the markets now is some of the best fish I have ever tasted.  It's particularly rich and succulent for sockeye, which, while always flavorful, can be dry, and easily turns tacky if the least bit overcooked.  These fat fillets could have passed for king salmon.  I got mine at Seward Co-op, and they get it from Coastal Seafood.

I've done it on the grill, and it was fantastic; in the wake of yesterday's deluge we cooked indoors, pan-roasting the fish, oven roasting some baby beets and daikon flowers from the market.  Oh, and the plate was garnished with salted milkweed flower buds that toasted up for a couple minutes in the pan the salmon was cooked in.

Daikon flowers were a discovery at last week's Menomonie farmers market--never seen them before.  They look a bit like broccoli rabe at first glance, and the flavor and texture are somewhat comparable, with a bit more radishy pungency.  I have tossed them with olive oil, lemon juice, salt and pepper and put them on the grill.  Yesterday, oven roasted with a bit of sunflower oil, coarse salt, and sliced green garlic, at 425 for about 10 minutes.  Wonderful, fun to eat, and if you can get your hands on some I imagine you will impress even the most up-to-the-minute of your trendy foodie friends.  Use whatever flavorful cooking greens you find at your market or in the garden--you know, pea tips would have been really good.

Beets, the beets, oh my god the beets!  So sweet and tender and with a caramel spice fragrance that was incredibly appetizing.  Roasted in a covered baking dish at 425 for 35 to 40 minutes until they pierce easily with a paring knife.  Beets this tiny do not need to be peeled.  The little whiskery tails were a delicacy, intensely sweet, a bit burnt, a tad licoricey tasting.  They were great with the mayo flavored with lots of very finely minced green garlic and just a little tarragon, which will take over.  Show it who's boss--I used the chopped leaves of a four-inch sprig for about 2/3 cup of mayo.  (My basic mayo method here; in this case I did a two-yolk batch, and the oil was 1 1/4 cups canola and 1/4 cup olive. I've taken to making mayo in our 8-quart stainless steel mixing bowls, which may seem like overkill, but keeps me and the kitchen a lot cleaner.)

We find that six ounces of salmon per person is an ample serving of this rich fish.  We cooked it in a cast iron skillet, and (secret ingredient) I used a bit of rendered fat from our home-smoked bacon.  Cook it skin-side down 75 percent of the cooking time to get the skin nicely crisp--the skin didn't brown as evenly as I would have liked, but was still delicious.  I blame the crappy electric range that came with the new old house.  I cooked the salmon on the stovetop for perhaps six minutes on medium-high,  then flipped it and put the pan in a 275 oven for a couple of minutes to finish.

For these last couple of minutes I also added the milkweed flower buds which had been rinsed, drained, patted dry, and salted generously, to make a quick caper ersatz.  A nice wild and seasonal touch, tasty and pretty.

There's this thing I like to say, sums up my foraging philosophy:  90 percent of good cooking is good shopping.  Case in point.  Bon appétit.


Text and photos copyright 2012 by Brett Laidlaw

Love 'Em & Leaf 'Em

It's a kind of culinary rite of passage, I think, embracing the heartier greens. Now, if you grew up with a pot of collards ever simmering on the back of the stove, that might not apply. In that case, long-cooked greens and pot likker, some cornbread crumbled in, that would be pure comfort food. But if you grew up white in Minnesota, where "greens" meant iceberg lettuce, and even fresh spinach was a bit of an exotic species, the idea of eating kale, turnip greens, mustard greens...well, the idea did not repel, but only because the idea simply did not occur. I'm not sure I even knew what those things were when I was young. Even in my years as a vegetarian, they were outside my ken, just too foreign (perhaps, too flavorful?) to register.

I don't really know when I first came to understand, then enjoy, then relish, dishes like roasted kale leaves or garlicky turnip greens. Certainly by the time I went to teach English in China, over twenty years ago, I was pretty familiar with the deep, slightly bitter flavor of dark green brassicas. In fact, it may have been by exploring Sichuan cooking here in the States, in my college years, that I came to appreciate the flavors of Chinese broccoli, bok choi, et al.


Now I plant several kinds of cooking greens in the garden every year--three kinds of kale, usually, turnips mainly for the greens, broccoli rabe or rapini (is there a difference?). Purple mustard plants itself--I started the ball rolling more than ten years ago in our Saint Paul garden, and haven't had to replant since. Those brightly colored leaves are so prolific, they'll even resow a couple of times in a season. And now that sort of begs the whole question of "greens," since the mustard is purple, regular Vates kale is called blue, the Russian kind is red, and the Tuscan-lacinato-"dinosaur" kale, that's cavolo nero in Italian, black cabbage.

I write of kale and its kindred leaves now because this is the time of year when we enjoy them most. I plant them early in the year and harvest young leaves,thinnings, for spring salads. When they start to become too tough, too strong for eating raw, I ignore them for a few months. I let them outgrow the depredations of the slugs, outlast pretty much everything else in the garden, and come back to them after the first frosts have arrived. That would be now.

Now, not only are those leaves beautiful just tossed with a bit of olive oil and roasted till tender, or dropped into soups, steam-sautéed with lots of garlic. Now, a remarkable thing has happened, which is that the frost has actually tenderized them, mellowed them, so the smaller leaves can be eaten raw again, with pleasure. So I made lunch today out of a handful of lacinato kale leaves shredded quite thin, tossed with a simple, pungent dressing, piled on toast and topped with a poached egg. This is the kind of brilliantly simple dish that always makes me ask, whether silently to myself, if I'm lunching solo, or, sadly, rhetorically if in company: Why can't you get something like this in a restaurant around here...?

Other things I like to do with kale: Add to a long-simmered Chinese dish, like anise-flavored red-cooked chicken; top a pizza, along with some currants, crumbled blue cheese; chop and sauté to mix into a frittata.

Kale will only improve through many frosts. Really, as long as the temperature is popping back above freezing for a few hours each day, you can leave it in the garden and pick as needed. Before the really cold weather drops down, though, I like to harvest bunches of leaves, wash them, trim out the thicker stems, then blanch them briefly in a big pot of boiling water. Just as soon as they wilt I remove them, shock them in ice water, then squeeze them into sandwich bags in single-meal portions, and freeze them. They compress amazingly. It's one of the best frozen vegetables I know, and extremely welcome come mid-winter, when a small bunch of imported kale at the co-op may cost upwards of two bucks, and disappear in a single meal.

That salad, it really is a gardener's delight, best when you have access to the tender leaves of spring, or those frost-nipped leaves of autumn. To make it I took

About 12 small leaves of lacinato kale, rinsed, shredded
1 small clove garlic, minced very fine
1 Tbsp sunflower oil
2 tsp apple cider vinegar
1 good pinch coarse sea salt
1/4 tsp sambal chili paste
Black pepper
Chives or another fresh herb, optional

1 egg

Mix all together and let sit for at least 15 minutes. Toast some good whole grain levain bread. Butter the toast. Pile the salad on top. Poach an egg (or soft boil, or cook over-easy, or to taste) and top the salad with the egg. Grind a bit of black pepper over all, and snip some chives, or another fresh herb of your liking, over the dish. Sprinkle on more coarse salt, to taste, just before serving.


Text and photos copyright 2010 by Brett Laidlaw