Roast Duck Breasts with Pomegranate-Chile Sauce

It looks like today is a poultry day.  I started off the morning with a post about roast chicken breasts and now I am following it up with roast duck breasts.  I have a number of other posts that I could substitute for this one, but I am kind of digging the poultry theme I have going on so I am going to stick with it.  Anyway, this duck recipe is what I served Alex and my father for Christmas dinner.  There were other sides and such that went with it (including a version of this salad to which we added radishes and cherry tomatoes and a pumpkin cornbread - more on the cornbread later).  Since I was cooking I got to pick the recipes and duck was a no brainer because it is is one of my absolute favorite things to eat.  As far as I am concerned, a nice Peking duck is one of the finest meals in the world (a nice seared duck breast is a close second).  Brussels sprouts were another no brainer because I love them dearly and they are easy to roast.  This duck breast is one of those dishes that is more than the sum of its parts.  When I first tried the pomegranate-chile sauce I wasn't sure what I thought - it had a lot of flavor from the pomegranate juice, the adobo sauce and the dried chiles.  It was interesting, but I wasn't sure how it would go with the duck.  In some ways it almost reminded me of a really refined take on a BBQ sauce (if BBQ sauce ever involved pomegranates).  Duck is fatty enough and flavorful enough in its own right to work well with fairly aggressive sauces and seasonings, but I was a little worried that this might be taking it a little too far.  But once I tried a mouthful that combined the duck, the sauce and the little pomegranate seeds, I realized that it all came together really well.  The duck is rich, but the sweet, tart flavor of the pomegranate seeds and the slightly sweet, slightly spicy sauce make a really nice dish.  Given that the sauce starts with a caramel, I really expected it to be a little sweeter than it was, but the caramel gave it a nice deep, subtle sweetness to balance out the chiles.  I didn't think it was at all spicy (but if you have a more sensitive palate you might disagree), although the flavors of the chiles and adobo were definitely present.  You might need to modify the cooking times if your duck breasts are particularly large or small, but as written I think the recipe is pretty spot on for normal duck breasts.  This isn't the world's most refined and elevated duck recipe, but it is a very interesting and beautiful one.  Plus the colors were pretty perfect for Christmas if I may say so myself.

Recipe after the jump!

Chipotle Meatballs

Alex has proposed a challenge - one whole week of cooking where we are not allowed to use any recipes and have to come up with everything all on our own.  It's going to be a tough challenge, but I am game.  But it can't be this week because I have already planned out all of our meals for the week!  Whatever week we end up picking for our challenge, I will let you guys know in advance.  Or at least I will let you know which dishes are part of the challenge.  And it might end up taking more than a week - I think I am going to adapt the challenge a little to do seven meals that are uniquely ours, even if it takes two weeks. 

For this week we are still using recipes that I picked out from other websites, cookbooks, magazines, etc, like this one from Simply Recipes.  The reason I wanted to make this recipe (aside from the fact that it sounds delicious) is that it would use up the ground pork in the freezer and the remaining chipotles in adobo and crushed tomatoes that we used to make our Smoky Shrimp, Hominy and Tortilla Soup.  It also had the added benefit of using up our remaining scallions and a half of an onion we had in the fridge.  Sometimes things just work out and it's wonderful.  And everything worked out with this recipe - it used up random ingredients in the fridge and it was really tasty.  We served it over brown rice and I thought it was delicious.  We were both a little worried that the flavor of the chipotles would completely overwhelm the flavor of the meatballs themselves but between the bacon and the ground pork the meatballs were porky enough to stand up to the spicy, smoky flavor of the chipotles.  Considering that they were only briefly simmered/tossed in the sauce, they soaked up a surprising amount of flavor while retaining their integrity.  I thought served over brown rice they were a fun variation on your typical Italian-American spaghetti and meatballs.  And who doesn't love a good spaghetti and meatballs?

Recipe after the jump!

Chicken Tinga Tostadas

Happy Cinco de Mayo everyone!  Last year we made Skirt Steak Fajitas with Lime and Pepper and Chili-Rubbed Shrimp with Avocado Corn Cocktail.  This year we were a little less ambitious.  I wanted to make something a little different, so I originally wanted to make enchiladas, but then I changed my mind and we made tostadas instead.  I originally planned on making tres leches cake as well as these tostadas, but by the time I got out of work it was too late to swing by the grocery store to pick up all of the ingredients.  Plus the cake is better the next day.  The recipe I want to make for Tres Leches Cake with Dulce de Leche actually requires baking and soaking overnight (which a lot of other tres leches recipes also require).  If we have time this weekend I will bake the cake.  If not, I will leave it for another occasion.

There's a great little hole in the wall restaurant called The Great Burrito near our apartment that does a mean pork tinga.  Before dining at that restaurant I had never heard of tinga of any sort.  It turns out tinga is a typical Mexican stew-like dish from Puebla that can be made with chicken, pork, or beef.  At The Great Burrito you can get pork tinga as a topping for your tacos, tostadas, or nachos, as a filling for burritos, etc.  The pork tinga from The Great Burrito gave me the idea for these tostadas.  We didn't have pork, but we had plenty of chicken in the freezer.  So I went ahead and adapted a variety of recipes that I found on the internet to make our chicken tinga.  I was pretty excited about how the recipe turned out given I really had no idea what I was doing.  The chicken had a pretty intense flavor and a respectable kick after being tossed and simmered in the chipotle and fire-roasted tomato mixture.  Poaching the chicken left it pretty moist and made it a blank canvas to absorb the flavors of the sauce.  When I first tasted the chicken it was lacking some of the sweetness that I remembered from the version at The Great Burrito, so to make it all a little sweeter (and to loosen up the sauce a little) I added some apple cider.  I really like this method of baking the corn tortillas to make tostadas in the oven because they are far less greasy this way and more evenly cooked than if you pan fry them.  So when you put it all together you get a crunchy tostada topped with smokey/slightly spicy chicken, creamy queso fresco and avocados to cut through the assertive flavors of the sauce, garnished with a squirt of fresh lime juice and cilantro.  It's quite tasty.  Don't omit the lime juice because I think the dish needs a bit of acidity and that bright lime flavor to really bring it all together.  I hope that everyone's Cinco de Mayo meal was as yummy as ours!

Recipe after the jump!

Smoky Chipotle Hummus

2 15-ounce cans garbanzo beans (chickpeas), drained

1/2 cup water

1/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons tahini (sesame seed paste)*

3 tablespoons plus 2 teaspoons fresh lemon juice

2 tablespoons olive oil

2 1/2 teaspoons minced canned chipotle chilies**

1 large garlic clove, minced

1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin

1 4-ounce jar sliced pimientos in oil, drained

1/3 cup chopped fresh cilantro

Read More http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Smoky-Chipotle-Hummus-with-Garlic-Bagel-Chips-105661#ixzz0klNV4Ckn

For our dinner party last night we made both tzatziki and hummus to serve with pita and some of those mini sweet peppers that are super tasty.  Since I couldn't decide which one I wanted to make, I made both.  Sometimes less is more, and sometimes more is just... more.  The only problem with making both sauces/dips was that I had to wash my food processor twice.  Oh well.  It was worth it!

The smokiness of this hummus was wonderful.  I tend to love spicy hummus recipes, rather than the more traditional hummus flavored simply with tahini and lemon juice.  Nothing against traditional hummus, but spicy hummus is just way better.  Generally I go for jalapeno hummus, rather than chipotle hummus, but this time I was in the mood for something a little different.  This hummus is all about the smokey flavors of the chipotles and the ground cumin.  I loved the smokiness, but if you're not into smokey flavors, the combination of the chipotles and the cumin might be a little much.  Feel free to omit the pimentos if you don't have any, because I don't feel like they really added anything in terms of taste to the hummus itself, but they are nice for a burst of additional color. 

Recipe after the jump!