Jul 21 2008
Slow Cook Sunday
A family supper with most of the work done in advance. Marvellous. And a sore wrist. Less so.
- Crispy Duck
- Forgotten Pudding
My parents bagsied the Crispy Duck recipe right back at the beginning of the challenge. With the general release of Wall•E (D and I saw it at the Edinburgh Film Festival, la-di-dah! but were more than happy to see it again) it seemed an ideal opportunity to get the family together and take advantage of my lovely new kitchen.Nigella sells the duck recipe as fuss-free cooking- you even get someone else to open the Hoisin- but I spent most of the afternoon fraught with worry that the duck was going to be completely dried out and dinner ruined. Perhaps because of this fear, I didn’t serve the duck directly to the table but whisked it away to extract the meat myself. I rather wish I hadn’t now; the meat looked rather sad and small on its plate where the duck had looked magnificent, in a brown sort of way. Also, apparently you are supposed to serve the skin too, which I didn’t realise. And I didn’t make a very good job of the ‘going at the meat with a pair of forks’ serving style, perhaps just because I lacked confidence.
In any case people seemed to enjoy making up their little parcels of spring onion, cucumber, hoisin and duck, and it certainly wasn’t a labour-intensive dish, so perhaps I shall come back to this again. The next time I see a duck at half price in Sainsbury’s! (An added and unexpected bonus this weekend).
Pudding was more generally successful. Forgotten Pudding, so called because you switch it in the oven at bedtime, turn the oven off, and forget about it, worked really well. It was huge- the meringue mixture filled our ‘it’ll probably be too big’ swiss roll tin more than adequately but let me tell you, whipping six egg whites by hand is no joke. Must buy electric whisk. And I’ve just missed the clearance in John Lewis too.
After the main course, I whipped the family into action (groan) and got them to take turns whipping cream to top the pudding, which I then scattered with passion fruit, strawberries, and unusually but most sucessfully, brambles. It tasted about as amazing as it sounds! Because there was cream of tartar* in it the base was squidgy like marshmallow rather than brittle like meringue; apart from adding less salt than Nigella suggests (I reckon a mere pinch rather than the called for quarter teaspoon) I think this takes some beating. However, as Suburban Mum previously discovered, this is emphatically not one to make if you are a devotee of oven cleaner…rather too delicate a flavour!
*Go and read the Wiki page on Cream of Tartar and marvel, as I did the other night, at the thought process that goes “perhaps if I take the clear bit only of this egg and whip it up a lot, it will do something interesting…ooh, it does! … and perhaps if I scrape these totally unknown crystally things off the inside of this barrel of wine I’ve been making, and add it to the whippy eggs thing…and bake it really slowly and gently…oooh, yes, yummy squidgy outcome…” I mean, really? Could olden-days scientists not afford Sigma Chemicals or somthing?
Have confidence! The duck was yummy, though there is surprisingly little meat on a duck and for a proper feast you would probably have two…. but cooking two ducks for the first time would be even more nerve-wracking!
Hares eat a lot, my farming friends tell me. You know this is true.
I thought it was all marvellous, so there
Hares do eat a lot, and whilst the recipe claimed to serve 4-6 (and so I thought I was safe, what with one small appetited-NotHare) I probably hadn’t taken into account that between the five of us we’d actually probably only had two and a bit full meals all day.
Pudding was *excellent* cold today, by the way!