Recently in Ingredients Category

I'm not entirely sure of my reasoning, but I decided that I'd see if preparing a roast chicken for a Wednesday night dinner was a feasible option.  Between tossing up ideas with Decay, and some google-fu, this small, apparently organic, supermarket chook got a hot lemon shoved into its insides, some garlic and mixed herb butter rubbed under its skin, and then got to nestle in with a bunch of potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, and garlic that had had some boiling time with the hot lemon, to sit in an oven at about 200°C for about an hour and 10 minutes or so.  It's partly Mr Oliver, and partly random things we might've done previously to chickens in the past.  Is it feasible for a non-Wednesday weeknight dinner?  Only if we're not going to be eating with X.  For a Wednesday night, it works out ok, as long as we can get it into the oven by about 5pm.  Tonight, it didn't make it into the oven til about 5:30pm, due to some crazy random things that happen because it's life. 

Lumpy was over for dinner tonight as well, so the chicken was pretty much decimated of all its meat.  It was quite tasty, not just tasting of garlic and lemon and herbiness, but also, CHICKEN!   I know that sounds odd, seeing as this is a roast chicken, but sometimes, chicken just doesn't taste like anything specific, and it was nice that this chicken tasted like something that could be called chicken and not white filler meat. All the bony bits were thrown into a pot with some onions and carrots, covered with water, and put on the stove to turn into stock.  Stock, which is sitting in a jug, that Decay has reminded both of us does not contain cordial, despite sitting next to a couple of jugs that do contain cordial. 

While we were out grocery shopping on Saturday afternoon, we were rather surprised to see duck breast fillets, of all things, at the local-ish supermarket.   Our list did actually include getting some sort of meat so we didn't have to defrost something from the freezer, for dinner that night, but it ended up that we had pancakes with leftover bolognese sauce from Friday night instead, for Saturday night dinner, and these two duck breast fillets got their cooking time on Sunday evening instead.   

Decay cooked them up like he's done chicken breast fillets (skin on!) - pan seared, skin side down to render some of the fat out, and to get the skin to go crispy (hopefully!), and then the whole pan in the oven, to roast until done. 

Apparently these duck breasts were going to take 6 minutes after their initial skin searing, but we ended up going for 9 minutes instead.  In hindsight, we probably could've done longer on the searing prior to oven time, because rather a lot of fat was rendered from the skin, and done with maybe a minute less oven time in total.  You can see from the slices that it was cooked through, but still a teeny bit pink. 



The duck ended up being served with roasted potatoes, sweet potatoes, pumpkin, and some peas, for green on the plate.  X monstered his way through a lot of roasted vegies, squished the shells off some peas, and ate a little bit of duck as well.  Decay threw together a white wine, garlic, and lemon juice reduction kind of sauce to go with the duck, and it helped to cut the potential richness of the duck.  Above plated pic isn't the best, but it sure tasted good!

And the post title?  Um... I blame Triangle and Robert.   It's apparently on strip #807, but I haven't yet found the specific comic (although here is a link to a post on the T&R message boards referencing it, but it's got to be plural ducks, not singular ducks like I've used in the heading of this post ... because it would make even less sense if I made the title plural ... not that any of it made any sense whatsoever anyways ... ), but I'm sure Stirfry Ninja knows what I'm talking about!

Yesterday, a small package arrived in the mail, more exciting than the usual bills and things addressed to people who don't live here.  I'd made a small order with Vanilla Products USA on ebay, hoping that the Australian Quarantine and Inspection Service would deem this safe to deliver.  They had indeed opened the package to inspect it, and declared it all clear to deliver to us, which is how we've found ourselves with ... 40 vanilla bean pods! Decay is kind of wondering what I actually planned to do with so many vanilla bean pods (and I'd actually only ordered the smallest sample pack, another 10 were thrown in as a bonus), and at the moment, some of them are destined to turn some vodka into some vanilla extract, and the others are more than likely going to be put to use in whatever randomness I happen to bake. 

We had a bit of a deli-spread kind of lunch for our Monday public holiday - slices of sopressa, jarlsberg, a few dips (roasted eggplant cashew and parmesan, spring onion, and roasted capsicum),  and a breadstick.   X got some bread, had some cheese, and a little bit of the spring onion dip on a bit of bread.  Yum!

We've also had sopressa on pizza, and toasted cheese sandwiches made with the leftover jarlsberg previously - not sure how the leftovers this time will end up being used!