Duck Leg Tagine
Biscuits or Rolls?
This Saturday was the occasion of another dinner that was mostly experimental. I learned some techniques and picked some recipes out of top-end chef cookbooks.
The Mezza plate was not experimental…it was composed of the usual pickles and fruits and the center piece was the Sublime Brined Smoked Chicken wings. I added a new tidbit—soft dried kumquats— which were a big hit. It was purchased not soft dried myself. However, I wonder if it could be replicated by just not drying it the full amount or if it is a totally different technique.
The soup and four-leg dish was an Ottolenghi lamb cannellini soup. A winter soup, it was substantial…lamb stew meat and beans and potatoes. With lightly crushed cardamom pods and lots of garlic. But it somehow lacked a pop. Tasty but not high end. Just a good substantial winter soup. And who doesn’t like that. The suggestions from the test subjects were to add ginger in the beginning or maybe just more lemon juice. No photos on this one. Photographer error. That’s me.
The soup was accompanied by pumpkin biscuits, although I have been instructed that these are yeast rolls, not biscuits. I tried to up-grade it by putting fig jam and goat cheese in the middle. But my technique left something to be desired. Really really tasty. The combination of fig jam and goat cheese and pumpkin biscuits is wonderful, but I need to figure out how to enclose it. Empenanda style? Or just pipe it into the middle? Or just wet my fingers to close it up?
In the future, I intend to experiment with butternut squash as the pumpkin and to see if green Chile jam, or just hot sauce, might work as the flavoring.
The Duck Leg Tagine was clearly a keeper and will remain in rotation.
Seared duck legs placed over a bed of onions and garlic with dried apricots and walnuts and a sauce of rose harissa. Yum!
Dessert was not the sorbet I usually serve. I am trying to learn to make something other than sorbet, which I have down and is easy and tasty—and may I say, (gasp!), healthy. But…this time, I made a spice cookie from Ottolenghi. Most of his stuff is so tasty and generally easy. The spice cookie wasn’t easy to make. Also, you apparently you can’t exchange coconut sugar for superfine sugar. (I still balk at feeding “white death” to my friends…they say they don’t care, but I feel bad about feeding them something that I think is really bad for their microbiome(gut health). In any case, the cookies had a different color and they didn’t flatten out. But they were really really tasty. So next time it has been suggested by my grumpy(grumpy because I won’t feed them white sugar) guests that I make it as a bar and cut them up and dip them in chocolate.
I will report on the success or failure next week.
The conversation high point was a guest who explained what she had learned about the social mores of tango. How to ask someone to dance the tango is an art form apparently. Who knew? Tell me please. Which of my readers dance the tango?