My Favorite Things - IV

A Cooking Day

On those days when Katherine is off earning travel and health care money, I sometimes like to spend the day cooking something semi-complicated for that evening's dinner.  It's a little like June Cleaver making her special Beef Wellington to welcome Ward home from a hard day selling insurance and dispensing homilies.  I add writing to the process and this is what qualifies it as my fourth favorite thing.  

Yesterday with Katherine off to her first full day observing teachers since our return from New York, I got to spend the day alternating between cooking a killer duck recipe in the kitchen and working on the final scenes from my second soon to be unpublished novel.  I know, I know.  That sentence makes me sound like a smug asshole, but I don't feel like that at all.  Mostly, I find myself genuinely surprised by this and other little bursts of creativity.  We're going to take a brief time out before we get down to the serious business of recipes and I'm going to ruminate for a second on creativity.

Living with the likes of my wife and my children, I've always felt like something of a dolt on the creativity scale.  If you know them, you know what I mean.  I'm okay at creating balanced sentences (sometimes) and writing polemical essays, but I'm talking about creating something out of nothing.  Coming up with a new idea.  A new show.  A new routine.

We all have those little moments that gnaw away at us late at night when we can't sleep, or that come jarringly back at us at the slightest trigger.  I had one such moment with Nate when he was a senior at good old GMHS.  I had just come up with the infamous Job-JB small group assignment.  Past APEs will remember.  For those of you who have no clue what "past APE's" refers to, in the assignment in question I built small groups around "artists" I had identified in class and asked those groups to create a dramatically structured retelling of Job that would be like a sophisticated children's book.  The presentation would include cartoon scenes on the overhead (technologically a long time ago), a script, and two musical numbers.  It was a fun thing to do after a few intense weeks in class.  I based the idea on an old Tom Hanks' movie, NOTHING IN COMMON.

Nate was in the class when I explained the assignment to the mock (maybe serious) groaning of my students.  That night he told me what a cool assignment he thought it was.  "It sounds like something Kathie came up with," he said.  Don't worry, I got over it quickly.  But you see what I mean about me and creativity.

That's what has been so cool about my life since I've retired.  It's ironic, I know, but I feel more creative now than I ever did when I was in the classroom.  I'm creating stuff out of nothing.  And it is keeping me off the streets.  Look at Yesterday.

What follows is a great step by step recipe for a deconstructed duck with other things thrown in for good measure.

5 am:  Go to the kitchen to make coffee and tidy up from last night if I was too tired to clean up then. Be careful to avoid MORNING JOE.  Go to ESPN instead.  Put oatmeal on and read paper.

6 am:  Go to King Soopers to pick up a few things for the recipe.  Have to go this early because I forgot to boil the potatoes last night to let them cool all day.

6:30 am:  Steam 2 large idaho potatoes (if you want to impress a couple of friends and turn this into a dinner party for four, steam 3 large potatoes - but they MUST be Idahos) for about fifteen minutes.  You only want them partially cooked because you are going to grate and fry them up in a galette right before dinner.  If you aren't sure if you've cooked the potatoes enough, cut one in half.  If it is clear the central core of the potato is raw (it will be a different shade of potato), steam it a few more minutes.  Put the "cooked" potatoes in the icebox.

7 am:  Go to computer and reread yesterday's output.  Go back upstairs and hang out with Katherine (we watched a recording of the most recent Nuggets' game) until she has to go to schools.

9 am:  Say good bye to Katherine.  Turn "La Boheme" on full blast on the stereo.  Go downstairs and work on the final scene of BEEZUP which takes place during a llama obstacle course at the Estes Park Wool Festival.  Keep working until the opera is done, about two and a half hours.

Noon:  Clean and truss the duck.  Roast it at 350 for 30 minutes.  Don't panic, there will be more cooking to come.  No one is asking you to eat raw duck.

12:30 pm:  When the duck is out and still warm, take the skin off (Start by cutting a slit down the middle of the breast and peel with the help of a great knife from there).  Preserve the skin in as big a sections as you can to use for cracklings (Yum).  In your skin peeling mode, you will eventually get to the wings.  Take them off (you'll figure it out and besides who's looking?) and save them for duck stock  (Yum).  Do the same with the leg and thigh.  Separate the leg and thigh.  Set the legs and thighs aside.  Take the two breast halves off carefully.  So now you have two legs, two thighs and two breast halves. Take everything else and put in a stock pot, add some vegetables and seasonings, and make a duck stock.  Meanwhile, film a frying pan with duck fat or oil, slice the breast meat into reasonably thick slabs.  Put a bunch of chopped shallots in the bottom of the pan, fan the duck pieces on top, add more shallots, pour in half a cup of duck stock or chicken stock if you must (more stock obviously if you are using two ducks), pour in a little less than half a cup of port, season lightly with salt and pepper and set it aside until dinner time.

Next, take the legs and thighs, spread Grey Poupon mustard liberally over them and roll them in freshly made bread crumbs.  Arrange them in a small roasting pan and set aside until dinner time.

Take the duck skin and cut it into quarter inch strips and place in a 350 degree oven, turning frequently.  After about a half hour two things will happen:  you will have a lot of rendered duck fat and you will have cracklings.  Keep both for later.

There, now you are all done until a half an hour before dinner.

2 pm:  Go downstairs and copy edit that morning's production.  By the time I get done, Kathie is home and we hang out and talk until it is time for dinner.

5:30 pm:  Turn the oven to 400.  Open a bottle of Pinot Noir to let it breathe.  Put the legs and thighs in the oven when it reaches temperature.  They'll take about a half an hour.

Film a large frying pan with duck fat and heat up to medium high while you grate the two potatoes you were saving in the icebox.  Toss the grated potato lightly with salt and spread out in the frying pan to form a galette.  Keep pressing down every once in a while, but let the underside get nicely brown and substantial before you attempt to turn it (good luck flipping it, but that is all part of the fun).

Immediately before serving put the cracklings back in the oven and put the pan with the breasts on a medium high burner to lightly poach.

Putting it together:  Place the flipped over and perfectly done potato galette on a serving platter large enough to accommodate it.  Take the breast meat out of the pan and immediately turn the pan up to high in order to reduce the liquid to a nice syrupy sauce.  Fan the breast meat over part of the galette.  Take the legs and thighs out of the oven and place on the galette.  Ditto the cracklings.  Take your time so the sauce can reduce.  Pour the sauce over the breast meat and take to the table.

The great thing about this recipe is that it makes it possible for both the breast meat and the legs and thighs to be perfectly cooked.  The breast does not get dry.  The other great thing is that there is plenty of time to write in between steps.  Another one of my favorite things.