Queen Of The Leftovers

Spaghetti Carbonara?

I know, you can't really see the eggs, but they're in there.  Along with some duck breast prosciutto scraps taking the place of bacon/pancetta or whatever other flavorful, salty, cured meat is hidden in that spaghetti.  After slicing our Duck Breast Prosciutto we ended up with scraps because, wow! that prosciutto warms up quickly!  I froze the scraps and later, while drooling over some cookbook photo of spaghetti carbonara, I decided to turn those leftover duck prosciutto scraps into an exciting dinner based on the traditional favorite, Pasta Carbonara.  The prosciutto provided a nice fatty, salty flavor for the pasta.  I sauteed some locally raised shallots in the fat before adding the spaghetti and local fresh eggs.  And it tasted divine even if the photo didn't do it justice.  I wish I had cracked one final fresh egg over that hot dish.  Delicious. You see,  I could never let those sliced prosciutto scraps go to waste...they had potential as "leftovers."

And that is one of the reasons that I think one description of me could be "Queen of the Leftovers."  I actually feel, sometimes, like some reincarnated memory of the Great Depression, a memory that comes from a farmer, from the kind of family in which my Grandma was raised in upstate New York.  I know that she was poor and the effect was a thriftiness that lasted all her life.  Somehow, she passed some of that on to me, especially when it came to home life.  I am a re-user of household stuff.  Old T-shirts become dust rags, old, but still good fabric becomes patches, old sheets cover my crops in possibly freezing weather, old towels have numerous applications, and the list goes on.  I don't make rag rugs, but I really like the idea of them.  But I digress, because what I'm really, really good at is food leftovers.  Leftovers as meals.


Wild goose breasts in pork fat

My husband complains that we never have first overs.  He thinks I scout the neighbors for leftovers.  Sometimes he's right.  Last year, my friend, Mark, gave me six wild goose breasts that an acquaintance had given him.  Since they were skinned, I knew they would be drier than usual so I had to think of a good way to use them.  What process could be better than to confit them?  I didn't have any goose fat but I sure had a lot of rendered pork fat so it was an easy task turning them into confit. After a month in the fridge, we tried two of the goose breasts and they were still dry. Unfortunately, they also had some buckshot in them.  I thought about tossing them but that thrifty saver inside of me said "no, let them sit longer in the fat."  We tried them again at three months and they were still somewhat dry but the next two had no buckshot.  My hopes rose.  Finally, after six months we tried the last two and they were moist and delicious.  My husband's had one piece of buckshot but it didn't take away from how good the goose breasts tasted.  Dang good leftovers from friends!

Pancetta, shrimp, and fava bean pasta

During my year of Charcutepalooza I found many uses for the leftover portions of a bigger dish.  Pasta dishes came easy to me.  I love the combination of a salty, cured meat product with shrimp, roasted, ground fennel seeds, hot pepper flakes, and a vegetable.  Using the pancetta seemed a perfect combination to the shrimp and fava beans resulting into a complimentary blend of textures and assertive flavors.  Some extra heavy cream pulled everything together as well as leaving a light but luscious coating on the pasta.

Head cheese made it into several different soup dishes including Yellow split pea and Navy Bean soups. I also loved using it for Head cheese hash. To me there is some unexplainable affinity between poached eggs and head cheese, so that became an easy Sunday breakfast.

Sausage, by far, is the easiest leftover.  I love the choice of the various kinds of sausage I made last summer during the year of Charcutepalooza.  With all those choices calling to me from the deep freeze, I knew we would be eating lots of sausage this past year.   From cabbage stuffed with merguez sausage, to mac 'n cheese with garlic sausage, to Italian sausage sandwiches, to pasta sauces filled with a variety of sausage flavors to just plain sausage on the barbecue, all that homemade frozen sausage is wonderful to have in the freezer and it certainly fulfills my junk food obsession for sausage.  Plus, aren't I using leftovers....

I make stock out of any leftover bones, fat, and meat.  I save herbs from my garden and use them all winter.  I do have some fresh herbs in my sunroom, including rosemary, bay, and lemon verbena, all plants that I have to over-winter indoors.  I can jams, jellies, chutneys, pickles, butters, sauces, and even dried morels.  And it doesn't stop there.  After using a nice, fresh vanilla bean in my version of David Lebovitz's poached pear dessert for the Charcutepalooza finale I had to save the vanilla bean.
 

Spicy vanilla bean sugar

After removing it from the liquid, I allowed it to sit for several days until it dried.  I assumed it had become infused with the other flavors .  For the leftover version of all that spiciness, I stuck it in a canning jar filled with sugar. After a month of infusing all that spicy goodness into the sugar, I could already catch the heady aroma of that dessert.  I figure that by saving the spicy infused vanilla bean it means I can pick up my crown for Queen of the Leftovers.  And wow! that sugar sures tastes good in my morning bowl of oatmeal....


Spicy sugar oatmeal



Wishing For Tomatoes

Tomatoes for roasting

These tomatoes are what I'm longing for.  It is now February and we've endured weeks on end of either 20F or 30F weather.  It has also been a rather "brown" winter without much snow- only enough to not melt on our few sunny days.  The remaining snow, and any melted snow, now freezes everyday which requires ski poles, skill, guts, or those little chain ice-walkers.  I'm beginning to feel like a cow yearning for the fresh grass of springtime.  I keep looking for signs of chives, usually the first green to grow in my garden, and so far my search has not been fulfilled.  I think I'll order seeds and let the growing begin.

Yes, I've been absent for the past month or so.  Fall semester barely ended before Christmas and when that happens my favorite holiday seems to whoosh by.  I spent most of my vacation time updating classes and preparing for the spring semester.  I also worked voraciously on my book business.  Then my computer caught a virus so I spent several days performing a system recovery.  Actually, the recovery part was easy but all the updating was tedious.  My next computer will definitely be an Apple.

I have not stopped cooking.  For Christmas eve dinner I made sugo d'anatra, a duck ragu.  I'm still missing the skin that I assumed would be on my locally raised ducks and I thought the ragu would at least keep the duck moist.  It did and it was delicious!  For Christmas, since there were only four of us for dinner, I cooked my locally raised chicken, from the same source as the chicken I used for that time-consuming but fully-worth-it Chicken Galantine.  That is something I never would have made without Charcutepalooza.  And it was so good, that I will definitely make it again!


Spicy Noix de Jambon

Right after Christmas I also bought another pork leg and proceeded to make some new noix de jambon.  I made three "real" noix de jambon, then I experimented with roasted, ground fennel with garlic as well as a spicy jambon.  I made two each of both ideas on some smaller cut noix.  The fennel became too gritty so next time I would do it with whole, fresh fennel seed and garlic, although I'd be worried about bacteria forming because of the raw garlic.  For the spicy noix de jambon I coated it with Spanish smoked paprika and cayenne.  Needless to say it was hot and delicious.  The three regular noix also turned out yummy.
I've been rummaging through the freezer, cleaning out those products with expiring dates.  Needless to say, I'm just about out of sausage so that is on the calendar.  I've added leftover pork pieces (from the not-so-capable butchery of two pork legs) to risottos and pasta dishes.  I even added some pork, instead of beef, to a wintry batch of borscht.  The borscht did much more than double duty because I used up last summer's beets, carrots, and cabbage as well.  With some duck breast prosciutto scraps I made a carbonara and the list just goes on and on. 

My birthday is coming up in April and I'm already thinking about a Chicken Galantine....  We'll see.  Usually for my birthday I give myself the gift of making a very difficult dessert that I haven't made before.  One year I even made Sherry Yard's six layer Dobos Torte that she made for one of  Wolfgang Puck's famous Oscar parties.  Wow!  That was not only delicious but also great fun!  I don't know what will happen this year but the ideas are simmering on my brain's back burner....galantine, pork pie, head cheese....

The Charcutepalooza Finale: Choucroute Garnie



Choucroute Garnie

Growing up we always had our dinner together at the kitchen table.  We had no dining room so the kitchen table had to accommodate all six of us.  Having three younger brothers and living during a period of traditional gender roles, I often ended up being my mother's helper, whether cleaning the house, folding laundry, or cooking something.  My mother was never big on cooking and we pretty much had the same things for dinner every week.  Variety came from some of the first fast food joints, the local Italian pizzeria, and dinner with friends.  Of course, I wasn't a very big eater so I didn't really care about what was set in front of me.  I liked the ubiquitous spaghetti that was my Italian grandmother's recipe, but aside from that my mom usually made something very New England like pot roast, or very easy like biscuits with chicken gravy (thank you Campbell's Soup).  But there was one dish that my Dad loved, and I learned to love it too, and that was pork chops, potatoes, and sauerkraut oven-braised in a covered casserole dish.  My mom served it with gravy and I hesitate to think of where the gravy came from.

So, when the December Showing Off challenge was announced, my mind enthusiastically wrapped itself around the idea of Choucroute Garnie.  From 1984-1985, I lived in Stuttgart, Germany which is only about seventy miles from Strasbourg, the capital of Alsace, the home of Choucroute Garnie. The people of Stuttgart speak Swabian, which, like Alsatian, is one of the Low Alemannic dialects. As in Alsace, the people of Swabia (Stuttgart and the surrounding area), pay much attention to cured meats. Indeed, every town contains a Metzgerei, a butcher's shop where charcuterie is found in abundance.  My husband and I loved the food.  When my parents visited in the summer, my husband and I took them to Strasbourg for some Choucroute Garnie and three of us ordered it.  My mom ordered some chicken dish and I wondered if she hadn't really liked the pork chops and sauerkraut that she made so long ago.  I had made Choucroute Garnie a number of times in my adult years but this was the first time I would be tasting it in some fancy restaurant in Strasbourg. I don't remember the name of the place but it was very close to the cathedral.  It may have been Maison Kammerzell.  The food tasted sublime and exceeded my expectations.  I don't remember all the meats served with it, I only remember devouring most of it.

Having spent this past year diving with great expectation and fun into the Charcutepalooza challenges, I began to do some research on the history of Choucroute Garnie in order to serve an authentic dinner.  I also wanted to regale my guests not just with wonderful food but also with anecdotes about Choucroute Garnie like how the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, when in Paris, ate it every day at the Rotonde in Montparnesse.

I also wanted to explain how this very German style dish came to be found in France. Alsace's location, west of the Rhine River and backed by the Vosges Mountains, made it a strategic place for both countries, as its history reveals. At the end of the Thirty Years War in 1648, Louis XIV annexed the area into France where it remained until the end of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, when Germany took over Alsace.  After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 gave the territory back to France. With the rise of Nazi power in Germany, Hitler annexed Alsace in 1940, but at the end of World War II, the area was returned to the French government.  Although this history of sovereignty must have been exhausting for the citizens of Alsace, it also seemed to bring out the best of both countries when it came to food.
As for other trivia about Alsace, that famous song "Les Marseillaise," known by many for its timely occurrence in the film Casablanca, was composed in Strasbourg.  A number of famous people have come from Alsace, including such illustrious chefs like André Soltner and Jean-Georges Vongerichten.  Marcel Marceau, the famous French mime came from Alsace as did Marie Tussaud of wax museum fame.  Also, according to the Saveur Cooks Authentic French cookbook, Alsace is known for its many starred Michelin restaurants.  As I remember from my year in Stuttgart, it is an interesting area because several close borders, including not only France and Germany, but also Switzerland and Austria, exchanged sovereignty, visitors, neighbors, friends, and family throughout its history.

I set the date for the Charcutepalooza final meal for the Sunday after Thanksgiving.  With the end of the semester and all its extra work looming in front of me, I wanted to give myself plenty of time!  I invited six, close friends who had been following and reading and hearing about my charcuterie escapades throughout the year.  They also had sampled some of the challenges.


Hors oeuvres

I wasn't quite finished with the final set up when my guests arrived, so my hors d'oeuvres table wasn't ready, but I quickly set out all the hors d'oeuvres, thus beginning an evening of showing off my newly acquired charcuterie abilities.  All the hors d'oeuvres had been made in advance and only needed to be displayed and eaten.  The day before I had done some preliminary preparations like making bread and sauce to serve with all these delectable charcuterie tidbits. In a blatant attempt to bribe the judges, I baked a loaf of Michael Ruhlman's Classic Rye Bread with Caraway Seeds and a boule of Bob del Grosso's Alt-Sourdough Technique bread in which I substituted some of the bread flour with rye flour and added some caraway seeds.  They were both delicious!  I had once been served pork rillettes with a Sauce Gribiche at Santé Restaurant & Charcuterie in Spokane, WA, so decided to do the same at my Charcuterie dinner, using the recipe from The Lutèce Cookbook.  For the charcuterie, I served thinly sliced noix de jambon, pork confit, melon squares wrapped in duck breast prosciutto, Anne Burrell's Bacon Wrapped Dates Stuffed with Manchego but wrapped them with pancetta instead, and a pork paté, as well as some cornichons and olives.  Both the hors d'oeuvres and the entree were served with coarse ground mustard and Dijon mustard.  We had to force ourselves to stop eating all the hors d'oeuvres in order to save room for dinner.


Choucroute Garnie

I compared a number of recipes for Choucroute Garnie in order to figure out some of the correct meats and spices. In the end, after looking at recipes from  Julia Child to Anthony Bourdain to Jeffrey Steingarten to André Soltner, I decided that I would pretty much follow the recipe from Soltner's Lutèce Cookbook.  I deviated slightly depending on what meats I had on hand and what I could make.  After smoking some ham hocks and frankfurters, which turned quite dark and smokey because the Brinkman Smoker doesn't have an interior thermometer, I received an early Christmas present: the Bradley Smoker.  I was able to use the ham hocks after boiling them a bit and changing the water for another simmer.  The frankfurters weren't too bad and had to be used because time was slipping away.  But, using my new Bradley Smoker,  I was able to make a delicious, stuffed sausage, Saucisses Montbéliard (a simple, garlicky sausage often used in Alsace in Choucroute Garnie).  I also made some pancetta, the salt cure, but made it flat so I could cut some large cubes to cook with the choucroute.  I had a small, fresh ham that I ended up brining, after which I cut it into manageable chunks, gave them a quick sear in rendered pork fat, then put it all into the choucroute as well.  I also added the cubed pancetta pieces, pork hocks, Riesling, onions cooked in pork fat, some of own chicken stock, juniper berries, cloves, caraway seeds, and bay leaf, covered the casserole and roasted it as 325F for an hour and a half.  Finally, I added the frankfurters and Saucisses Montbéliard which had been simmered lightly,and the boiled potatoes (from our garden) so that all the flavors would blend.


Spiced poached pear

We finished the dinner with a light dessert.  I decided to serve something both light and Alsatian.  Pear trees flourish in Alsace and are frequently used to make pear brandy.  They are also used to make the famous Alsatian fruit cake/bread known as Bierwecke.  Not having any real Alsatian pear brandy, and knowing from experience that the fruit cake is quite heavy, I decided to us our own Bosc pears to play off the pear theme and make some spiced poached pears.  I followed David Lebovitz's recipe.  I think I added too much ginger because after poaching the pears the ginger flavor dominated.  To take off that hot, almost bitter edge, I reduced the liquid with a bit of pomegranate syrup.  It tasted divine.  I served them on top of an Amaretto and Mascarpone Cream topped with crumbled, Amaretti cookies.  Then we made ample use of wine as a digestif.  We were satiated.

Noix de Jambon, Oops, Salt and Air-Cured Pork Belly

Noix de jambon

This may look like Jambon de Camont, and it may even taste like the re-named noix de jambon, but I confess, I cut all three of my noix de jambon too small, so by the time they had gone through the salt stage and the cold smoke stage, they had already lost 30% of their weight.  It made for a very easy challenge, but somehow I felt like I didn't really meet the challenge.  If I had hung them, they would have just become smaller and drier.  They certainly tasted good and, although the small and medium ones were a bit salty, they were still edible.  I saved the large one, the most edible, for my last and final December challenge.

I didn't have time (end of semester deadlines) to order another fresh "ham."  Actually, my local USDA butcher, Woods Meats, informed me that they were selling me pork leg because it wasn't ham until it was cured.  I smiled.  I've become well acquainted with them during the course of the year.  I wasn't even sure I could order more pork leg because this is the time of year when they're preparing for holidays, brining and curing their own hams, and stocking up for the winter.  I can't even buy pork back fat from them this time of year!  Luckily I have extra in the deep freeze.  Also, they only slaughter pigs on Wednesdays, so it would be another week before I could order another pork leg.  I wasn't sure what to do....  I thought about lonzino, but again, what if that went wrong as well?  And, I had never tasted lonzino.  Wonder if I didn't like it.  Oh, what to do? what to do?

Dry sausage like chorizo or saucisson sec all required too much time because of the grinding, cooling, mixing, cooling, stuffing, cooling, hanging.  I do love dry sausage and intend to make Spanish chorizo, Hungarian salami, and Saucisson Sec, but not in the midst of grading final papers, essays, and exams.

So, I turned to one of my favorite parts of the pig: the belly.  Since I couldn't get the pork back fat for lardo, why not some pork belly?  I love pork belly!  If I bought just the right size, I could make flat pancetta to use as large chunks of pork belly in the December challenge and use the rest for a small, cured pork belly - lardo with striation!  I had just enough time for twelve days of salt cure and eighteen more days hanging until November 30th.


Salt & Air Cured Pork Belly, aka Lardo

I took the pork belly out of its box in the heat controlled room with humidifier.  It looked and tasted salty and porky and lucious, but I was pretty sure that it needed more time.  It hadn't lost enough in weight (does that matter with lardo), plus I wanted that full 24 day hanging.  It's beautifully white with small striations of meat.  I believe that it becomes saltier over time, also drier, yet the fat will still dissolve almost instantly into the homemade bread I'll serve it on.


Cured pork belly on homemade rye bread

I tried it on some homemade, sourdough rye.  It's really good, but I think it will just become more and more delicious for each additional day I allow it to hang.  And after eleven months of charcuterie, I know that I need to go for the flavor.  Hurray, Charcutepalooza!

Whole Hog: Appreciation Of The Animal Who Provides Our Food

I wanted to call this particular blog "From Nose To Tail" but I wasn't sure of the copyright laws regarding someone else's title, i.e., Fergus Henderson's The Whole Beast: Nose to Tail Eating.  It's a wonderful book, as well as a feast.  Fergus Henderson is just one of a number of recent chefs who have brought people back to the age-old appreciation and tradition of using the entire animal that sacrificed its life for our consumption.  Other chefs include Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Chris Cosentino, and others, as well as many of the people interested in sustainable food like Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, authors of the 100 Mile Diet (the original link to their 100 Mile Diet website appears to have disappeared so I give you the Wikipedia synopsis - I did follow the original website and their year eating such a diet).  The list grows ever longer and now includes film as well.

But, back to "appreciation of the animal who provides the food."  I saw that "illuminating moment" while watching The Next Iron Chef: Super Chefs on Sunday, 10/30.  Maybe it was just my own personal Tipping Point, when I finally saw, with my own eyes, how a chef truly appreciated and knew, within his own ken, how to treat every part of an animal.

In the first part of this competition for the next Iron Chef, the chefs were teamed up in pairs.  Outside in the California countryside, they then had to make a fire with grill, butcher a small pig, and create two dishes that would win the competition.  The chefs came up with many very creative and delicious dishes.  I drooled over all of them.  But the genius, illuminating moment appeared for me while watching Chef Michael Chiarello.

Chef Chiarello was paired up with Chuck Hughes.  They made, for the first dish, a Crispy Pig's Ear Salad with Beets and Pork Cheeks. Their second dish consisted of Chili Maple Glazed Pork Chops with Pig Brain's Duxelles served on Grilled and Poached Potato with Grilled Pork Belly.  That illuminating moment came as I watched Michael Chiarello, using his hand, scoop the brains out of the pig's head and add them to the celery/duxelles mix, explaining that brains are "...creamy, voluptuous, and buttery."  He continued by adding that brains have "...great flavor and texture."  After seeing what he did and hearing his beautiful description I think something inside me changed and suddenly brains no longer held fear of kuru, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, or some other animal infestation of what, to my mind, however rational or irrational, is connected to mad-cow disease.  Suddenly, I understood that the brains, which are mostly fat, are very useful and contain that luscious porkiness flavor, and thick, buttery texture.

To think that only a few months ago I wondered what happened to the pig's brain while simmering the head in an aromatic broth.   Later, after an email to my internet friend, blogger, inadvertent food science mentor, and Charcutepalooza judge, I did learn that brains are mostly fat. Throughout this year, my participation in the Charcutepalooza community has taught me much about charcuterie and food in general.  I doubt that I would have appreciated Michael Chiarello's usefulness with the brains, had I not learned so much this year.

If I really want to appreciate the pig I raised, the pig whose every part I need to use in appreciation for the life that pig gave to me, I need to appreciate all the body parts offered by the pig, with the same understanding that a chef like Michael Chiarello has for the animal and the food produced by its parts. And it's not just the raising, the butchering, the use of the parts, and the ability to create great dishes from the parts, it's looking at what's at hand and using it in the most efficacious and delicious way possible.  I mean, why would I throw extra butter into a duxelles when the brains are right in front of me?   Frankly,  I think that Chef Chiarello's use of the brains were pure genius.  The other chefs used many parts, but that use of the brain, for me, was the highlight. 

And you know, I think I'd love to use the brains in a celery, wild mushroom duxelles.  Wow!  I even think that the pig would smile with me.

Finally, Duck Breast Prosciutto

Duck Breast Prosciutto with Melon

Yes, I finally made the Duck Breast Prosciutto.  It was the first challenge for all the Charcutepaloozas which began in January, 2011.  I became a member of this distinguished group of bloggers towards the middle of January, if memory serves well, and so was excused from meeting the first deadline.  Instead, I had the rest of the year to make the duck breast prosciutto.  I waited until I could order it fresh, with another item I really needed from D'Artagnan.  D'Artagnan isn't anywhere near my neck of the woods, and because I try to be sustainable and local, I ended up waiting months to place that order. The rest of the time I just drooled while examining their website.  But finally an appropriate need occurred with the appearance of the September Packing Challenge, sparking my overwhelming desire to make the Duck Roulade.  So I received my fresh Moulard Duck Magret, Half Breast when I ordered a Whole Pekin Duck in September. 

I used the recipe from Ruhlman and Polcyn's Charcuterie.  It was very easy and fun to make, although I used too many wraps of cheesecloth and had to remove some halfway through.  It tastes divine, with a bit of chew, good salty, peppery flavor, and an end of pure duck flavor on my tongue!  However, I think that when I do it again, I'll take off some of the fat.  It was just too much in my mouth.  But that same fat also brings in much more flavor when fried or broiled.  Decisions, decisions....

I tried it first plain.   While picking all the veggies before the first frost hit, my husband found the mini cantaloupe in the garden.  We're not even sure how it came to be there, and, with our long, rainy, cold spring and rather cool summer, it just didn't grow much.  Because it's so small, it didn't have a burst of flavor, but it looked so cute that I had to serve it with the prosciutto.  On another occasion, I used the prosciutto with pasta.  But now I'm saving it for the last Charcutepalooza challenge.  If there's any left, I'm sure I'll use it up pretty quickly in a pasta dish, on a pizza, fried with some vegetable, or just scrambled with eggs.  However I use it, I know the taste will be all I want it to be.

Gala Chicken and Rock 'n Roll Duck

Steve Jamsa, Photographer

I couldn't wait to make the Chicken Galantine!  I had a chicken in the freezer raised and butchered by my friends, Seth and Talina.  How local and sustainable was that!  This was to be a meal that did more than meet the Charcutepalooza challenge, it also became one in which I satisfied my desires to stay local and eat sustainably.  I had accessible to me all the ingredients except the salt, peppers, Madeira, Pâté spices, pistachios, and cheesecloth.   It felt good to be able to use so many local ingredients making a dish that is so elegant and classic!

I not only made the Chicken Galantine, but, having some leftover filling, I also made a pâté.  I always have local morel mushrooms which I receive fresh and then dry myself so I reconstituted some for the galantine.  I also added pistachios to the forcemeat.  Other than those two ingredients, I followed the recipe from Charcuterie.

Removing the skin from the rest of the chicken was pretty easy, except, heeding the advise of my hubby, I cut the skin around the top rather than the base of the drumsticks.  Dumb move.  It left me with a slightly smaller piece of skin than I would have had but it all worked out okay.  I used the extra forcemeat to make a  pâté which I baked in a ramekin.  I lined the ramekin with some rendered duck fat that I had made after making rillettes and covered the pâté with foil before baking it.

Chicken Stock

I grow my own bay leaves and thyme so I added them fresh to the chicken stock.  Because I'm in north Idaho, I do have to bring the bay tree inside during the winter.  But it still thrives!  The stock was delicious and after a good straining, I poached the galantine in the stock.



Steve Jamsa, Photographer

Some friends, Steve, Diana, and Alice stopped by after work for a sample of the galantine and a glass of wine.  Steve, a professional photographer, honored my request to shoot some photos.  I offered some other goodies as well, including lingonberry preserves (like the cranberry jelly with turkey), pickled ginger, olives, crackers, cherry tomatoes from the garden, and other "small bits" as well.  Everyone loved both the galantine and the pâté.

After the work on the galantine, I had to wait a week before starting in on the Duck Roulade. Because I also work, both dishes took two days. However, at least I knew how to take off the skin properly and to cut the thighs and legs at the base!



Duck Roulade

Unlike the chicken, I had to buy a duck raised elsewhere.  Usually, I pick one up across the border in Creston, B.C.  But I decided to take advantage of the wonderful discount offered by D'artagnan to the Charcutepalooza bloggers and I ordered a Pekin duck.  It arrived quickly but, since I had ordered a frozen duck, I had the opportunity to put it in the deep freeze while I honed my skills on the chicken.


Duck skin ready for freezer



Duck skinned

I invited two friends for Duck Roulade dinner, my neighbor, Gary, and my best friend and chef, Mark.  Mark arrived with several bottles of Elsa Bianchi Malbec from Argentina.  He always knows how to put a meal over the top!  I really enjoyed the wine and thought it went perfectly with the duck.  For dinner, I also served mashed potatoes and parsnips along with buttered pole beans, all from my garden.  It was delicious!  Everyone loved the duck roulade and it was a lovely closing to this time-consuming challenge.  And I was very, very happy that it all turned out so yummy!