Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving, for us, has usually been a very informal affair. Josh and I like to stay home, and preferably not leave at all. In years past, I've always made something Chinese to stock the freezer, either dumplings or spring rolls. This year, with all the pickling, I just didn't feel like it. In fact, I have like another six pounds of cucumbers in the fridge that I also don't feel like doing anything with but it's a real space-taker.

Anyway. Josh slept super late, so we had a very late first meal of Pine St Mexican chorizo with potato tacos. Still, I like to eat Thanksgiving dinner at dinner time. So many people I know eat way earlier. It feels weird to me. We did it last year, and we had a grand time, but still, it is weird to me.

The last couple years we have cooked, we have done venison. After all, that was at the first Thanksgiving and turkey wasn't, right? You always get interesting reactions when you say you are doing venison. But venison has been hard to find for some reason, so we opted for duck this year. And since it's Thanksgiving, you might as well go with something complicated, that you might not make on a casual weekend.

So we decided on Jacques Pepin's skillet duck recipe from Julia and Jacques: Cooking at Home. I remembered it being a lot of work, but worth the effort. Although parsnips are good, we decided to go with sweet potatoes instead.

It all starts with a whole duck. Whenever we have fried chicken, I break down the chicken myself and save the carcass for stock. So I feel like I'm pretty comfortable breaking down chicken. I'd only broken down a duck once before which was the last time I made this recipe. We had the cookbook open to the steps and played the DVD a few times watching Jacques do it so that I could watch. It was miserable, I remember. This time, with all my chicken-breaking-down experience, I would just use the cookbook.

So it was me, my boning knife, my poultry shears, and a chef's knife that I never touched. Oh yeah, and the whole duck. Step 1: remove extra neck skin and fat. So I did that. And then stared at the duck realizing that I actually did it to the duck's butt, you know, where the large cavity is. DOH. Happily, I don't think it affected much and I did it the right way, and then finding the wishbone was much easier.

Then you cut off the thighs which was more difficult than I would have expected to find the bottom seams. Then you separate the drumstick from the thigh and they really seem like more than one piece than you would think. Then off with the breasts which were rather huge. Jacques specifically calls out pulling off the whole breast (just pull it off?) and then some smaller breast "tenders" so I did that too even though it seemed weird. And for the wings, I did the best I could.

So here are my duck pieces. I reserved one duck breast (see how big they are?) to freeze for another meal. You can see the thighs are quite long. i don't know if they are supposed to be like that but they cooked up pretty small in the end.

The recipe starts with cutting the neck skin/fat up and putting it into a skillet until the rendered fat completely covers the bottom of the pan. I like to use my large cast iron skillet for this, but the recipe calls for a tight-fitting cover, and I don't have one large enough for my cast iron. (Note to self: go buy one.) So after you have enough rendered fat in the pan, you push aside the neck skin and add all your pieces, skin-side down. Then you let it cook on med-high for 20-25 minutes so all the fat can render out. With my smaller non-stick restaurant-supply-purchased skillet, it just fir everything. Good thing I left out that extra breast.

So once the time is up and the skin is super crispy, plus there is a ton of rendered duck fat, you add in your veg, which for us was sweet potatoes, garlic cloves, and whole shallots. Plus two sprigs of rosemary and a couple bay leaves. Then you cover it, turn it to low, and let it go for 30 min more.

When the duck comes out, it has basically been confited. The skin is crispy and delicious and most of the fat has been rendered out. The meat is tender and luscious. One might even say unctuous. Even my odd-looking butchering job looked relatively okay on the plate.

The veg have also been confited. They don't look too special.

I saved the carcass for stocking making and had a lot of skin/fat left over, so I rendered it all to save the duck fat and cracklins. I also saved all the duck fat from the recipe. That duck fat is salted so I have to be careful when I use it in a recipe.

We had some sunchokes left over from a trip to the farmers market a couple weeks ago, so we picked up some spinach and did a sunchoke/spinach puree, with a potato thrown in for creaminess. It had butter and heavy cream, both of which I generally avoid when doing the purees, but it was smooth and mostly sunchoke-tasting. I can't say that the puree looks very interesting in the bowl.

So Thanksgiving was relatively calm, except for the stress around breaking down the duck. I'm not looking forward to that again, although maybe if I did it more, I would feel more comfortable with it.

I'm thinking about some duck tacos... :)