This weekend seems to be the weekend for posting about hunks of roasted meats. On Saturday I posted a roasted pork shoulder. I finally got around today to posting about the honey-glazed roast duck that we made from Ed Lee's cookbook back on New Years Day. Pathetic, huh? I have no real excuse for being so delinquent in my posting, except that work is busy and we have been traveling a bit. It is particularly sad given how incredibly excited I was by this meal (both before and while eating). My laziness has nothing to do with how much I liked this duck. I LOVE duck in general and I thought this roast duck had really good flavor. It's no replacement for Peking duck, but it was a nice take on roast duck. My biggest compliant about the duck was that the skin needed to render more. It was still fatty and not at all crispy. It was more... sticky (and a little rubbery). I dunno if our duck was just fattier than the duck that Ed Lee uses - he might use some sort of free range duck with more flavor and less fat. But it was still really good. I loved the bourbon-pickled jalapenos that we served with it - they were the perfect boozy, sweet and spicy accompaniment for the richness of the duck and the sweet flavor of the glaze. Definitely serve the duck with some herbs and thinly sliced cucumbers because that freshness also works to cut through the fattiness of the duck.
Recipe after the jump!
We finally succesfully pickled something! Hurray us! This is our third attempt at pickling since Alex bought us a bunch of mason jars. First we made pickled rhubarb - which might have been totally delicious, except that it got shoved to the very back of the refrigerator and forgotten. By the time work slowed down and I found it I was too skeeved out by the fact that it had been in there for a few months to eat it. Pickling attempt #1 went in the trash. Then we tried pickling green beans. Our Szechuan Beans weren't a total failure, but we weren't happy with them. But these pickled green tomatoes were full of wonderful complex flavors. They were much better than the green beans, which were harshly vinegar-flavored and left you with an oily aftertaste. These green tomatoes were spicy, with a very distinct floral flavor from the coriander and the sweetness of the cider vinegar and honey. Delicious. I have to give a shout out to Jacob's Pickles for giving me the idea to pickle green tomatoes in the first place. Their green tomato pickles are delicious, but I would pit ours, which I think were more aromatic and spicier, against theirs. You are going to want to serve these pickles with something meaty or fatty to offset the bite of the pickles. In my opinion, eating a bowl full of just these pickles would be inadvisable. You would totally blow out your palate after the first few and wouldn't be able to enjoy them as fully. We served them with our Roast Turkey Breasts with Asian Spice Rub, but I think fried chicken, juicy bone-in pork chops or egg and cheese biscuits would work too.
Recipe after the jump!
I am going to start this post off by giving a brief shout out to Alex. Last weekend we went to Cincinnati to visit his family. We were supposed to make these green beans Wednesday night, but we had tickets to a show and too much going on to make them before the show, so it didn't happen. Then we were going to make them Thursday night, but we had laundry to do and we just totally forgot. Friday morning I looked in the fridge and realized that we had forgotten to make the green beans, but I had to run off to work. So poor Alex got to hang out at home and make them that morning. And they were way more labor intensive than I had realized. Oops. Thanks (and sorry) hon! Actually, I end up doing that to him a lot - giving him a recipe and having him prep and start dinner for us while I rush home, only to realize that I never really read the recipe in the first place and it is way too labor intensive for a random Wednesday night when I don't get home until 9:00 pm. So thanks for being such a good sport!
Now, back to the green beans. I really wanted to like these green beans because the recipe sounded so promising, but they were a little too harsh for me. The vinegar flavor was just really strong, although the flavor that really lingered on your palate after the quick burn of the vinegar was the sesame oil. Alex says he wishes they had a little less sesame and a little more heat. The write-up on Serious Eats was just so complimentary that I really expected to love the beans, but they left me feeling a little lackluster when eaten on their own. We have another jar in the fridge that I think I will use as a garnish for soup or noodles. We had a noodle dish while ago at Mission Chinese Food (see our post here) that combined soba noodles with radish, pear and cilantro that I thought was mighty tasty. Perhaps we could make our own riff on it and use the remaining green beans? Maybe it was a little silly on our part to expect them to stand entirely on their own...
Recipe after the jump!
