Autumn weather, duck and fungi

 

 

The supermarket had prepacked duck joints this week for just over €5/£4 a pack.  This is the recipe I made up to cook them.

 

Preheat oven to 220°C – fan oven temperature.

Cut excess pieces of fat from the duck pieces and render down in small frying pan.

Place thick slices from a large onion in the base of a roasting tin.  Rest the duck pieces on the onions so they don’t touch the bottom of the tin.

Pour the rendered down duck fat  over the duck pieces and squeeze the juice of an orange over them too.  Tuck sprigs of thyme between the duck pieces and then season with salt and pepper.  Drape the duck with streaky bacon.

Into the roasting pan pour boiling water to depth of about 1½”/3.75cm.

Cover with lid or foil and cook in oven for 40 minutes.  Reduce heat to 160°C and continue to cook for a further 1 hour and 20 minutes.  Remove lid or foil and the bacon from top of the duck pieces and cook for a further 40 minutes to crisp the skin.

Remove duck pieces, keep warm while resting them for ten minutes and make the sauce.  Discard onions and reduce pan juices.  Then add a tablespoon or two of redcurrant jelly, some freshly squeezed orange juice and, optionally, a pinch of Chinese five spice powder.  I had some reduced rabbit stock from the pies I made so added some of that too.  It was a scrummy sauce.

 

I like to serve the meat off the bone so I stripped off the crispy skin, cut it into strips and ate that - cook's perks - then plated up the about a quarter of the meat with sauce, buttery mashed potato, and two home grown vegetables; courgettes in garlic butter and roasted pumpkin.  

I'm not sure yet what I shall do with the other three meals worth of duck, but I shall do some recipe research and meantime fridge/freeze the meat.

There were long periods of sunny weather inbetween the showers today.  I sat in the garden with a coffee in 23°C sunshine and then went walking with a camera.  Each day brings more and more fungi in the lane.  The first photo is of fungi growing on the old oak beams which form the edge of some of my raised veggie beds.

 

These two photos show two fungi in a neighbour's field.  They are about 8"/20cm across and about 10"/25cm high.  I took off one of my wellie shoes and balanced on one leg to give an example of scale.

 

Here are some of my chickens enjoying the warm weather in the duck field along the lane and some of my ducks enjoying the weather once the shower started about three minutes later.

 

Why are there catkins on the hazel on 3 November?  Is this another sign of global warming?

 

Back home because of the rain after visiting my neighbour who's still on bedrest with her broken leg.  Purrdy was curled up in the corner of the settee, Claude was very much awake and Daisy was woken by the camera beeping - I must put it on mute.

At the moment, one of the small roundabouts in St Nicolas du Pélem is surrounded by very large pumpkins and chrysanthemums.  The huge pumpkins make mine look like oranges! The cemetary is behind the wall in the left background and that will be full of chrysanthemums too, as they are the flowers that the French leave on the graves on All Saints Day, 1 November.  Prior to that date the supermarkets and florists are full of chrysanthemums which is a flower associated with death and is never used as a gift plant here.  Strangely, when my father died in England in 1981, the wreath I ordered for him was of deep raspberry coloured chrysanthemums.

 

 

Three things I like:

 

1.   Eating comforting cold weather foods now that Autumn is well established.

2.   My neighbour's grandchildren visiting me - well my rabbits really - but me too.

3.   Having an extra day of playing Short Mat Bowls this week.