One duck, six meals

OK, so the title of this post may be a teensy bit misleading.  But I maintain that I’ve done pretty damned well with stretching a single duck to make it as value-for-money as possible.  It turns out that when there are only two of you, it can go pretty far indeed…

So, A Man and I went shopping at the weekend and I had already come to the decision to buy a chicken for Sunday lunch and to use the meat throughout the week.  It turned out that per kilo, it was cheaper for us to buy a fairly large free range Gressingham duck than to buy a medium-sized free range chicken, so we decided to go for the duck instead.  So glad we did!  I’m afraid there are no photos with this post, as I started the blog after the fact (and slightly inspired by my experiments with the duck).  Hopefully I’ll get photos up of future meals.

Meal One – Roast duck

The duck came with giblets, so I took them out, and chucked them in the freezer (keeping the liver separate, for reasons which will become clear) for when I make stock.  The duck was roasted as per the instructions here and it worked beautifully.  We ate the legs with duck fat roasted potatoes, carrots and January King cabbage.  I poured the rest of the fat into a pot in the fridge (no point in wasting that!) and made a gravy from the roasting pan, with a splash of added port and a couple of spoons of A Man’s nan’s home made plum jam.  Yum!  Once it had cooled, all the meat was stripped from the carcass, and the bones put in the bag with the giblets in the freezer for later stock-making.

Meal Two – Fajitas

I thinly sliced an onion and a couple of peppers, and marinated them for a few hours in a little melted duck fat, with salt, chilli powder, smoked and un-smoked paprika, cumin, sumac, fresh chilli, garlic and a couple of teaspoons of caster sugar.  This was fried off, with some of the shredded duck meat and we ate it in warm tortilla wraps, with home-made guacamole, grated cheese, cucumber and shredded cabbage with lime juice.  A cherry, plum or gooseberry salsa would have set the duck off nicely in this, but I didn’t have the ingredients, time or inclination to do that.  Maybe for next time.

Meals Three and Four – Duck in Hoi Sin sauce

I cheated with this one.  Chopped up various veg to stir-fry, and mixed it with some shredded duck and shop-bought hoi sin sauce.  Served with chilli noodles and crispy wantons.

Meal Five – Soup

I haven’t got around to doing this yet, but the carcass and giblets which are sitting in my freezer will be made into stock and this will be added to whatever I happen to have in the kitchen at the time to make a soup.  I may blog about it when I get round to it.  Making stock is one of my favourite things to do after having a roast, and if I don’t fancy soup it gets frozen again and makes incredible gravy and sauces.

Meal Six – Paté

Again, I’ve not made this yet, and I accept that it can only be called a meal by stretching the definition somewhat but never mind 🙂  I think I will probably make my own recipe port and cranberry paté around Christmas (UPDATE – this has now been made!), but it depends on what I feel like doing.

So there we have it.  A whistlestop tour of how to make a single (albeit quite large) duck stretch to 12 portions of various meals.  We ate the roast, fajitas and Chinese from Sunday to Wednesday and I must admit to feeling a teensy bit fed up of duck by the end of Wednesday’s dinner, but it was worth the challenge.

Tootles!

Gemma xx

Welcome, one and all.

Hi there.  I have decided to start a cookery blog for the simple reason that I am continually flooding facebook with posts about what I’m having for dinner, and thought I needed a more appropriate outlet for my food-related blurting (although don’t get me wrong – I don’t plan to put detailed information of all of my meals on here!).

A little about me.  I grew up in Somerset, and started to learn how to cook as a tiny child.  I always loved being in the kitchen with Mum, and cooked my first meal by myself when I was about 7.  Since then, my knowledge-base has grown exponentially, and I like to think that my skill has too.  I’m very much of the “chuck it in a pan and hope” school of cookery, and usually it works out OK (although there are obviously occasional disasters!).

I have always been quite creative with leftovers – I hate to throw away food, and this comes from my family’s ethos.  If it doesn’t get eaten, it gets saved (within reason, of course!).  I am also incredibly bad at cooking for small numbers.  I learnt how to cook for a family of 6, including 3 very hungry brothers, an even hungrier Dad and countless visitors.  Through uni I solved this by inviting people over to eat all the time and eating the same dinner three or four nights in a row.  I’m currently solving it by having a freezer full of ready-made meals to be microwaved when I’m feeling lazy.

Whilst I was at uni, I used to cook and bake to avoid doing my work, and when I wasn’t in the kitchen I was thinking about the next dish I would be making.  This has continued since starting the Legal Practice Course, hence the title of this blog.

Congratulations if you’ve got this far.  I hope a few people enjoy reading my food-related ramblings, and if not at least I have somewhere I can splurge them 🙂

Love love

Gemma xx