Duckfest 2010 (day one)

Despite growing up around livestock (my family raised dairy goats, chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep and rabbits at various times), I’ve never had much to do with the process of turning a live animal into food. I’m not particularly bothered by the idea of eating animals, as long as they are raised well and killed humanely. All of our food comes from other living things, whether plant or animal. However, it’s a little different when you’ve met the animal you are going to eat, and even more so when you are present at, or responsible for, its death.

Jon and I have been buying more and more of our meat locally, and currently have pork, beef and lamb in our freezer from Skagit and Snohomish County farmers. We haven’t yet found a good source for chickens or ducks, but we’re working on it. But the more we buy whole animals straight from the farm, the more we realize how little we know about actual slaughter and butchering practices, and how to get the most from an animal. I don’t picture us raising animals for meat (not on our current property, anyway), but I really feel that knowing our meat from the ground up makes us better cooks.

Hence Duckfest, a workshop designed for just this sort of situation. We spent the first weekend of 2010 on Shaw Island in Puget Sound, learning to slaughter, butcher and cook ducks. The class was put on by chef and farmer Neal Foley, aka Podchef, and by chef, teacher and author Kate Hill, who graciously came out from her farm and cooking school in Gascony to demonstrate cassoulet and confit making. I love her book (sadly out of print at the moment), and I’ve been wanting to visit her school for a long time, so this was a wonderful opportunity – a taste of France just a few miles from our house!

The workshop lasted three days. We ate a vast amount of amazing food and took far too many pictures, so to spare my patient readers I’ll be writing it up in three installments. Here is day one (Cassoulet):

so long, 2009

Best wishes to you all for a joyous New Year’s Eve and a wonderful 2010.

Tomorrow we’re off for a three day duck extravaganza in the San Juan Islands with cook, teacher, and cassoulet/confit expert Kate Hill. Wish us luck!

all-day braised lamb

After the usual holiday diet of chocolate, too much coffee and a lot of salami and cheese, it’s always a good idea to have something solid in mind for dinner. I can hardly imagine a more perfect dish for Christmas day than long-braised leg of lamb. Get it going after breakfast, peek at it occasionally throughout the day, pull it out in time for dinner. The only downside is that it takes up oven space that you might want for, say, baking pie, but the braise can easily be moved to the stovetop (which is what we ended up doing).

The lamb braises in a wine-tomato-stock mixture, but then you get to fill in the space around it with whatever veg you like. The original recipe recommends turnips, onions and carrots; we left out the onions and threw in parsnip and fennel. The long, slow braising makes the vegetables incredibly tender while still retaining their shape, so they can be scooped out of the broth and served alongside the meat.

images from Christmas

Christmas is over and done with, and I would be back at work today if I weren’t home sick with a sinus headache and the sniffles. In my next post I’ll tell you about the six-hour braised lamb we made for Christmas dinner, but in the meantime here are some pictures from our weekend. Hope yours was fun as well!

we wish you a Merry Christmas…

…and a wonderful weekend to all.

potato love

Some people like chocolate, so I hear. The sort of people who say “eat dessert first,” and mean it. The sort of people who really would rather have something sweet than almost anything else. I am not one of those people. I like potatoes. The saltier, the better, but chances are good that if it is made of potatoes, I will probably like it. Potato chips are one of the finest things life has to offer, in my opinion (and I am vindicated in my opinion by the Parsi food pyramid). I am also very fond of small yellow potatoes roasted until they are creamy inside and crusty outside. But I don’t complain about potatoes bathed in heavy cream, herbs and cheese. Nope.

Yes, I was on a low-carb diet at one time. No, it didn’t stick. For obvious reasons. And this is why I walk several miles a day. To avoid being potato-shaped as well as potato-obsessed. Anyway…

We made scalloped potatoes a few days ago, for a celebratory dinner at home. We pulled out two pretty beef tenderloin steaks, threw together a Caesar salad, and tried a new potato recipe out of America’s Test Kitchen, which was still open from making challah the previous evening. The whole dinner was wonderful, but these potatoes really clinched it for me.

Challah, version 1

Having recently rediscovered the joys of challah, I’ve decided that one of my missions for the next year is to find my favorite challah recipe. I’ve only tasted a few so far, so I’m not sure what my ideal is yet. There’s really only one way to find out, especially since there isn’t a single Jewish bakery in our vicinity. Time to get baking!

For my first attempt, I picked a recipe out of my America’s Test Kitchen cookbook, partly because it made just one loaf – a much more manageable amount than some, especially considering that challah does not keep. Another time I’ll try Jon’s aunt’s recipe, but I’ll need to either scale it down or be prepared to feed an army. It makes a lot.

who, me?

Look at that face. Is that the face of a cat who would ever misbehave? Of course not. She would never steal bread off the counters, hurk all over the house, or bite someone trying to turn over in bed. Not her. She’s a GOOD cat. Mostly.

Have I mentioned that one of the first things this cat did as a baby was to steal an entire piece of pizza off of my plate? Her manners have not improved noticeably. Good thing she’s so cute.

giving back

One issue that food bloggers generally don’t have to deal with is not having enough food. There may be days that I have no idea what to make with the weird ingredients in my pantry, but starving is not usually much of a problem. Being well aware that this isn’t the case for everyone, I’d like to use today’s post to make a small plug for a bit of charitable giving.

For most of us, this is a hard time to scrape up anything to give, but it’s important to remember that it doesn’t have to take much. Food banks and cold weather shelters are always in need of more supplies, if you have spare canned food or blankets lying around. You can volunteer your time at a food bank or soup kitchen. Or you can, if you have it, give cash, which gives the charity the option of getting what they need most.

Many food bloggers are taking part in Menu for Hope, the brainchild of blogger Pim Techamuanvivit of Chez Pim. Featuring prizes donated by food bloggers all over the world, the event raises money through raffle tickets and donates it to the UN World Food Programme. I think it’s a fantastic event, and encourage anyone who’s interested to participate.

For myself, I prefer to look for needs closer to home. Jon and I donate to the Skagit Food Share Alliance, a program run by the Skagit Community Action Agency. By purchasing locally grown produce for food banks and hot meal programs, they work against hunger and support local farmers at the same time. It’s a win-win situation, in my opinion. If you live in the Skagit Valley or support the preservation of Skagit farmland, please consider donating.

spicy red sauce

Here’s a lovely sauce to make you feel like it’s summer again, even though it may be more than a little snowy outside. Oven-roasted tomatoes and peppers, pureed with chipotles and spices, then simmered with onion until thick, make for a spicy rich sauce redolent of the flavors of late summer. Using the sauce to braise country-style pork ribs makes for some fabulous winter tacos.

We’ve just started to get into the half pig we bought recently. The chops we started with were fantastic, pan-seared and coated with a cider reduction. More recently I tried braising some blade steaks in a sauce of vinegar, mustard and beer, which was eye-rollingly good but one of the ugliest plates I’ve ever produced (the braised green cabbage on the side didn’t help matters). These ribs came somewhere in between, and while I didn’t get any pictures of the shredded pork tacos, trust me that they were extremely successful as well. However, don’t feel that you need to use this sauce with pork – it would be great used for enchiladas, or on eggs, or stirred into a pot of beans, or anywhere that could use a shot of spicy tomato goodness.