I shall raise ducks

[quislet]

When I was a boy, we had chickens.  We lived in a little town, a village really, in the forests of the Pacific Northwest.  We built a cute little coop that looked like our house on stilts, and a fenced-in chicken yard underneath for them to stroll and scratch in.  Table scraps went into "the chicken bucket," and we kids were rather split on whether emptying the chicken bucket was an odious task or not.  My baby sister and I, having learned from these chickens where meat comes from, reveled in this example of the Circle of Life in our own backyard.  These lessons are etched into my memory with the adrenaline from my first rooster decapitation.  You see, my father's weenie interpretation of the Hippocratic Oath gave him reason to hold the bird instead of the axe.  I, as a nerdy little 10-year-old had to do the deed, but that's another story.  My father is a very fine man: kind, caring, generous to a fault.  He just hasn't fully made his peace with those meat-tearing canine teeth in his head.

This is to say that chickens were something of an epiphany for me.  To me, chickens are a symbol of where food comes from.  When dreaming of a simpler life in the future, those chickens have become an icon of much of what I'd like to see return to my life.  I yearn to be connected to where my food comes from, to be more of a part of the process.  One day, my recipes won't start in the kitchen, they'll start with sowing the seeds, raising the animals, ensuring the quality, care and flavor that I look for in the ingredients that I'm too busy working and schooling and parenting to raise for myself.

Today, after a busy morning of troubleshooting a database and supporting a mobile TV proposal in Germany, I decided to make a meal.  It was between the standard hours of breakfast and lunch (in this time zone), so I shall call it brunch.  I had the good fortune yesterday to be at Wegmans (in my humble opinion, the Walt Disney World of food), where I picked up some delightful bits of hard-to-find deliciousness.  Today's ingredient of choice is duck bacon.  

I know those words probably don't naturally go together in your mind, but bear with me.  This is uncured, smoked duck breast, sliced like thick bacon, with a rind of sweet-smoky fat on one side.  I picked out a large pan, got it warm, then laid the merlot-colored slices across the bottom of it.  They slowly bubbled and sang as they rendered up their fat and the lean breast meat crisped up on the outside.  Bacon cries out for eggs, and not having any duck eggs, I had to resort to chicken.  The fridge also yielded up some cream, fontina cheese and a sprig of fresh thyme to make up a scramble.

I drained off most of the drippings for later use.  I'm thinking there will be some very tasty greens in my future.  I poured my scramble into the pan, using a scant teaspoon of remaining fat and the crispy bits of the fond left there.  Gently frying on low heat, my pan deglazed into the creamy scramble while I blotted the bacon on "kitchen paper" (the British term is just so much cooler than "paper towels").  As I was plating, my niban came downstairs from her sickbed to discover that Dad had made not only bacon, but somehow it involved duck, too!  There was a w00t.

The bacon is thick and toothsome, a dark shade of pastrami.  The natural sweetness of the duck meat rolls around on your tongue, smoky and rich.  The fat, well, there is simply no word more appropriate for duck fat than luscious.  The cream and oozy, melted fontina managed to elevate the humble scramble on par with the noble duck.  Creamy and soft, the eggs are like a cloud streaked through with the bright, fresh flavor of the thyme and lemony, piney cracked pepper.

As Martha has so often oversaid, "It's a good thing." 

I can taste the sweet smokiness on my tongue even now.  That chicken coop in my future has just expanded.  There is a ground floor now, facing out the back toward a pond.  Oh yes!  There will be ducks.

And now to deal with the bluescreen that was summoned by my grandkitten standing on the other keyboard...

Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.  
Samuel Butler (1835 - 1902)

Comments

[rasputinagirl.livejournal.com]

What a lovely story above! I love it.I eventually would love to have that same outcome in my life,(sooner rather than later)...to grow and raise the food I and my family eat.How lucky are you to have lived with those animals!