The Walrus Blog

 We had a roast-in-the-bag duck crown in the freezer, but I wanted to feed the three of us, so I bought a couple of extra duck breasts. These Gressingham duck items seem to be in most UK supermarkets, and they are rather good. I also didn’t want to have all the faff of cutting the duck off the bones after it was cooked, so I decided to remove all the bones before starting, and combine all the meat into a single roast. On the left, you can see what is inside the roasting bag. The legs, and the tail end have gone to other customers. I often use the leg joints for confit duck.

Anyway, I sharpened my boning knife, and set to… here I have cut away the wings, and started to separate the breast from the rib cage, taking care not to cut the skin.

 

By this point, the rib cage, spine, and shoulder bones have gone into the stock pot, along with the wings, and are being boiled up for a lovely stock. The whole thing is a bit untidy, as this was the first attempt at this task, so I cut off the untidy edges, and rendered the fat from them, to add to my collection of duck fat. When I have enough, I will be able to do confit duck legs again.

I skinned the two separate breasts, rendering the fat from the skin, and put the breasts on the flat piece of meat. Out with the trusty supply of butchers’ string, and I eventually trussed the meat into a fairly tidy joint. The picture shows the second try, because the first time I did it, the two separate duck breasts slid out as I tightened the knots. It probably wasn’t as funny as I thought…
Here it is, in the handy aluminium tray that was supplied with the duck crown. I inserted a thermometer probe into the duck, as I didn’t want to ruin it by overcooking it. Anything over 50ºC would do that, according to the online sources I looked at. That’s 122ºF, if you are cooking in old money, as I believe some
countries do. I roasted it at 180ºC until the thermometer started beeping, and took it out of the oven to rest while I cooked the vegetables. The heat in the outer parts of the duck were conducted to the centre, and I was quite worried as it achieved a core temperature of 55ºC during that time, with no additional heat.
But, as you can see, the meat was still nicely pink and succulent. I would have liked the skin on the outside to be crispy, and will use a much hotter oven the next time I try this. Overall, though, I was very pleased with this meal. The sauce was a chicken gravy from the store cupboard (Bisto, since you ask) flavoured with some hoi-sin sauce. New potatoes, sweetcorn, and soya beans were good, too.

 

 

 

 

Here are some of the things I used to make a recent lasagne. It’s fairly hard to see, but there’s a bowl of home grown garlic at the back, on the right. Just push garlic cloves that are too small to bother peeling into the ground. A few months later, they will have multiplied enormously, and somehow pulled themselves down until they are six inches underground. I have no idea how they manage to do that, but they do. I must remember to ask my favourite botanist, if he ever visits us.

This is the humble, yet powerful, Oxo cube that I used, to flavour the rather insipid looking beef mince. Some people tear the foil off, and crumble the cube with their fingers. Try this… Pull the little flaps out as shown, and hit the cube a couple of times with your palm, until it is flattened. Now you can just rip it and tip the powdered Oxo straight into the pan. Isn’t that clever? I would credit the source of the tip, if I could remember it.

That meat will need to be browned properly, of course, before you carry on making the sauce, but you know that, don’t you? I wasn’t following a recipe, just doing what seemed likely to be the way I have made lasagne before.

Now some recipes have you put layers of sauce in with the layers of meat and pasta. I don’t do that, mainly because it increases hugely the amount of sauce you will need, and tends to make the final dish sloppy. I have been known to put in layers of grated cheese, and that can work quite well, but this lasagne didn’t have any.

Making the sauce is something one ends up knowing how to do without measuring things. A lump of butter of a certain size. A big, but not too big, spoonful of flour. Do not forget Colman’s mustard powder, about half a teaspoonful. It’s not enough to make the sauce taste mustardy, but it will seem dull if you forget to put it in. The butter and flour have to be cooked until there is what one recipe book describes as a “biscuity smell”.

You can see how it looks after the first little bit of milk has been added, in the third shot of the pan. Gradually, more milk is added, until the sauce seems runny enough to add grated cheese. Please use a decent Cheddar, not soapy cheap stuff.

Lately, I have taken to cooking the layered meat sauce and pasta while I make the cheese sauce for the top, and that does help to prevent it from being sloppy. The result can be seen in the last picture, along with a salad that miraculously appeared while the lasagne was cooking.

Nice tins of cider also got onto the table, and made the meal even more pleasant.

 

 

You know what they keep telling you: if you fall off your horse, you must get back on. We were not rich enough to have horses… we had to get back on bikes. Anyway… I had a bread recipe go hideously wrong a week or so ago.

This is the recipe, and it’s one I’ve used quite a few times. It’s a tasty bread that uses both yeast and sourdough starter, the latter for its flavour, rather than to raise the bread. It seemed a little wet when I took it from the fridge after its overnight stay, but it shaped in the usual way, and I put it into the proving basket. At this point, as the saying goes, I must have lost my presence of mind, as I forgot about it for a couple of hours…

The result of that was that it grew hugely, stuck to the proving basket, and made a remarkable mess when I managed to get it out. Scraping the rest out of the proving basket, and adding more flour as I tried to shape it again, I scraped the thing into a baking tin. Well, it was obviously not going to cook on the baking stone in a civilised manner.

Here it is. There was no point trying to score the top. I just cooked it, convinced it would not be worth eating anyway.

 

 

It came out like this, with a good big crack caused by the oven spring.

 

 

 

The crumb was very dense, and the crust could do with stronger teeth than I possess, but the flavour was reasonable.

 

 

 

Yesterday, I jumped back onto the bicycle, and used the same recipe. It came out of the fridge looking like dough instead of soup, and it didn’t stick to the proving basket either. Here’s the result. It’s lovely.

 

 

This was a dish I had been wanting to make for a while, although I was told I had done it before. Well, I’m allowed to forget things sometimes. As you can see, I’m using a Nigella recipe. It’s all over the internet, along with the scene from “A Series of Unfortunate Events” in which the children serve it. The recipe is everywhere, too, and is very simple.