Duck with Cherries — My Life as a Sauciere

Duck with cherries

We have made a couple of attempts at duck with cherries; each time, I’ve taken the position of making sauce. This is where all the work is, since the other part of cooking duck is score the skin and slap it down on a hot skillet. Then you sauce it.

The New York Times had a recipe for duck breast with cherries, and we wanted to make it during that window when cherries are in season. My (minimal) research showed me that there are variants of this dish, including caneton aux pêches, duck with peaches, so it can be thought of as duck with some stone fruit. James offered the opinion (and I concur) that the dish needs some acid with the sweet, so instead of duck with peaches, maybe apricots.

But we were using cherries. The first time I made this dish, I tried pitting the cherries with a knife, and in the end just halved them. But I knew it would look so much nicer with the whole, round cherries. So I bought a pitter.

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!

Who the Hell Needs Mario?

A little home cooking

We have found that when we travel it is very nice to have an apartment instead of a hotel room. Yes, with a hotel room you get someone in daily to do some sort of perfunctory cleaning, fresh towels, and the like. With an apartment you forgo all that for a kitchen and the obligation to clean up after yourself. But when you’re in an area in which you can get just about anything you want (for a price, of course), cooking can be very tempting.

We decided to skip the world of restaurants and cook our own damn dinner. In what follows, I took the role of sous chef. There can only be one person running the show, and we have learned long ago how to coordinate that. With this meal, I was relegated to the secondary role, but I was fine with that.

If you visit New York and you don’t get to shop at Citarella, you’re missing out on the splendid bounty that New York City has to offer. We were debating about what we wanted to do for dinner and our initial idea was “buy fish at Citarella.” We decided this on our way to something else. When the “something else” (a gathering of Esperantists at Union Square Park) was over, we headed back to Citarella. We concluded that buying food there and eating in would be cheaper (marginally) and quicker (ha!) than finding a restaurant. And we could kick back and relax (yeah, we did that).

---

You can follow my blog on Twitter (@impofthediverse) or on Facebook. If you like this post, share it with your friends. If you have a comment just for me, e-mail me at impofthediverse@gmail.com.

---

This blog runs solely on ego! Follow this blog! Comment on this post! Let me know that you want to read more of it!