canard à l'orange

Sabrina, a girl I've gotten to know a bit here in Nancy, goes hunting with her dad. There is a large woods behind our apartment, stretching off into the hills. I look at this woods now & wonder if this is where they go. We hear shots from time to time, & now I have a face that I like to put with them.

One day on campus, Sabrina came up to me. She explained that she & her father had gotten several ducks. They couldn't eat them all. Would I like one?

When in France, do as the French do.

Without a second's hesitation, I said yes–I would LOVE to try our hand at preparing duck, & it would be wonderful to know that it came from our region of France & someone we know instead of some nasty, polluting mega-farm. These are the conditions under which I allow myself to eat meat.

Hold the phone. This means that I have to touch a bloody duck & mess with it until its skin turns golden? I have to watch its blood thaw in a cold water bath all day? Yes, on both counts.

And I did it. We'd had the duck in the freezer for about a week, & I finally had time to dedicate myself to preparing it. Sabrina was kind enough to include her recipe for canard à l'orange (the traditional duck with orange sauce). Like most French recipes, it is a labor of love–one that connects you rather intimately to your meal over the several hours of preparing it.

Joe & I cleaned mushrooms, sliced onions, peeled carrots & prepared sauces while our duck's skin got to goldening in the oven. I did the duck myself: the draining, the slicing of its skin, the removing of fat. Thankfully, it came to us cleaned & ready for cooking. I just had to deal with looking at the neck. I'm not used to meat yet, having never really cooked it for myself (other than the few steaks Joe & I ate or the sausage I cooked for gravy).

The apartment was smelling great. We were getting hungry. The duck was sizzling & soaking up sauces. We took turns pouring spoons of the sauce back over the duck. The buzzer went. We set the duck on the table.

Then, we realized that we had not looked up how to cut the duck apart. We also have no knives, except for our "office knife" (a post about this little miracle man coming soon). It's sharp, trusty & ready for action, so we attacked the duck with it. The pieces weren't the prettiest. We had duck grease up to our eyeballs, but that golden skin & dark meat were so delicious I was about ready to pick up the carcass & chow on it for a while.

We also had loads of extra sauce with the vegetables, since there were only the two of us, which means the meal pulled double cooking duty: nice dinner to celebrate the official start of Christmas vacation & the base of a soup.

I ate slowly, mopped the soup up with our baguette, followed it with a warm cup of tea & felt remarkably accomplished for the night. We're set to try more French recipes over break, so I really needed this one to go well. My French food-cooking confidence is up 3 points. I'm ready for adventure...

...though I admittedly need to continue with prepared, rather bloodless pieces of meat. I stopped by the butcher to get some bacon for the sauce. Next to the lines of pork sausages & chunks of lamb were skinned rabbits with their eyeballs staring back at me. I needed a second to let the tears drain from my eyes before I could order the "cent grams de lardons." 

All I could picture was my poor little Baby, who is happily running around my parents' living room. What will I do without her? (So far without her in France, I've just been crying every few days & looking at the too numerous pictures I took of her.) But now I have this skinless image that has become what I see of when I think of her dying. 

Maybe I'll look up some meatless French recipes first?

P.S. I've started our Christmas album on my flickr. See the pictures here.