About a month ago, I decided to make a nice special meal for my wife for mothers’ day. I asked her what she wanted, and she said duck. This made me happy, since I consider duck to be one of the most wonderful foods in the entire universe.

I decided that instead of making one of my regular duck dishes, I’d try something new. I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do: I just went to the store, and looked around to find something that appealed to me. I ended up creating a dish that’s a real winner: duck breast in a port wine and mushroom sauce.

Ingredients

• 2 large duck breasts
• 4 shallots
• 1 clove garlic
• 3 tablespoons butter.
• 2 cups red wine.
• 1/2 cup port wine.
• 1 pound wild mushrooms, sliced.
• 4 or 5 dried morels, rehydrated in water, then drained and sliced thinly.

Instructions

1. Prepare the duck breasts: Take your duck breasts, trim off any excess fat or gristle, and cut a cross-hatch pattern into the skin on the breasts. (This will both help the marinade penetrate, and make the fat in the skins render more cleanly.)
2. Make the marinade: Put 2 shallots into a food processor, and mince them. Then add the red wine, and a generous dose of salt.
3. Put the duck in the marinade, and let it sit for an hour or two.
4. Sear the duck breasts:
   • Heat an unoiled pan till it’s good and hot.
   • Take the duck breasts from the marinade, and pat them dry, ten sprinkle lightly with salt and pepper.
   • Put the duck breasts into the pan, skin side down. Reduce the heat to medium, and cook them skin side down for 3 minutes. Then turn them over, and cook for another three minutes on the other side.
   • Then remove them from the pan, and let them rest for five minutes. (You can go ahead and start the sauce while they rest.)
   • Slice the breasts into medium-thick slices. You want them sliced a bit more thickly than is typical for a seared duck breast, because they’re going to cook a little bit in the sauce, and you still want the centers to be nice and rare.
5. Make the sauce:
   • Slice the second two shallots as thinly as possible.
   • Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a pan. Add sliced shallots and the minced garlic, and cook until the shallots are transparent.
   • Add the mushrooms, and some salt. Cook until the mushrooms are done. (How long that’ll take will depend on the mushrooms you picked; fresh chanterelles will cook in seconds; portobellos will take a few minutes.)
   • Add the port wine, and let the sauce reduce until most of the liquid from the wine is gone. Taste it now, and add salt and pepper.
   • Remove from the heat, and add another pat of butter, and stir it around until it melts.
6. Put it all together:
   • Add the sliced duck breast to the hot sauce, and toss it so that the duck is well coated.
   • Serve – arrange the duck slices on the plate, and cover with a generous helping of the mushrooms.

I served this with some slow-cooked collard greens, and a nice bottle of 1997 Australian Shiraz.

I do all of the cooking in my house; my wife amazing at baking, but she’s just totally lost when it comes to cooking. But given my commute, it’s hard to start making a nice dinner when I get home, and have it done in time to be able to eat, and have some time with my kids before they go to bed. So I like to make large dishes on the weekend, so that we’ve got a couple of days during the week when we just need to heat something up. So casseroles are a great thing.

Unfortunately, I don’t know a lot of casseroles. So a few weekends ago, I tried something new: pasticcio. Pasticcio is sort of like greek lasagna; it’s layers of pasta alternated with a meat sauce, and topped with béchamel sauce. I’ve had pasticcio in lots of Greek restaurants, but I never tried making it myself. It turned out really good.

The big secret to it is spices: in my experience, the difference between a really good pasticcio, and a bland boring one is the spices in the meat. The flavor of the good ones comes largely from a very nice middle-eastern spice blend called “ras el hanout”. Ras el hanout can be a bit hard to find, but it’s worth the trouble of searching for. It’s got a lot of ingredients, and the exact combination is very individual. So you want to either find a recipe and make your own blend, or else find someplace that makes a good one. It’s typically got things like cloves, cinammon, cardamom, mace, paprica, black pepper, and dried rosebuds(!). I’ve found a ras that I really like from the spice house.

Ingredients

• Meat Sauce:
  • 2 lbs ground beef.
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons ras el hanout.
  • 1 minced onion.
  • 2 large cloves garlic, minced.
  • 2 teaspoons salt.
  • 1 can diced tomatoes.
  • 1/2 teaspoon oregano.
  • 1/4 cup dry sherry.
  • 2 egg whites.
• Bechamel:
  • 1/4 cup butter.
  • 1/3 cup flour.
  • 2 cups milk.
  • 2 eggs + 2 egg yolks.
  • 1/4 cup parmesan cheese.
  • 1 teaspoon salt.
• Pasta:
  • 1 1/2 lbs pasta.
  • 1 tablespoon butter.
  • 1 pinch salt.

Instructions:

1. Cook the pasta. (to be authentic, it should be long hollow noodles – like uncut penne; I just used penne). When its done, toss it with just enough butter to stop it from sticking together, and a pinch of salt.
2. On high heat, brown the meat. While it’s cooking, add most of the salt, and half the ras el hanout.
3. Remove the meat from the pan. Deglaze with the sherry, and dump the liquid into the meat.
4. Add some olive oil to the pan on medium heat.
5. Add the onions and the garlic, and sautee them until they’re translucent.
6. Add the meat back to the pan.
7. Add the can of tomatoes, any remaining sherry, the remaining ras el hanout, and the oregano. When it comes to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer until most of the liquid has evaporated. Remove from heat, and set aside to cool.
8. When it’s cooled a little bit, mix in the egg whites. It should be cooled enough that the eggs don’t just cook when they hit the meat. They’re there to act as a binder, to get the meat to hold together in the casserole, so you don’t want them to bind until the casserole is cooked.
9. Melt the butter on medium heat. When it’s all melted, add the flour, and cook until the flour starts to turn golden. Then add the milk and salt. Cook it until it thickens – it should turn very thick.
10. Once it’s thickened, remove it from the heat, and add in the grated cheese and the eggs, and mix thoroughly.
11. In a rectangular casserole, put half of the pasta on the bottom of the pan. Cover it with half of the meat. Then add the other half of the pasta, and the remaining meat.
12. Spoon the bechamel sauce over the top of the casserole, to form an even layer.
13. Cover lightly with foil, and bake at 350 for 30 minutes.
14. Remove the foil cover, and bake for another 20 minutes, until the bechamel on top starts to brown.

Share this:

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...