January 8, 2013 Lunch – Miso Soup, Dinner- Roasted Duck in Orange Sauce with Brussels Sprouts and Onion Casserole

January 8, 2013 Lunch – Miso Soup, Dinner- Roasted Duck in Orange Sauce with Brussels Sprouts and Onion Casserole

I worked all day to get a large discovery request filed in my Lower Rio Grande Adjudication case, so I could not get out of the house for lunch.  I wanted something interesting to eat and since I had not used the container of tofu in the fridge I decided on Miso soup.  So I got out the container of white miso and fresh green onions and shitake mushrooms.  I filled a pot with water and one heaping tsp. of instant dashi and then put a heaping Tbsp. of white miso into the pot to dissolve and threw in the ½ cup of chopped parsley left over from last night’s Weiner Schnitzel garnish.  Then I looked at the newly reorganized seaweed section in the spice cabinet and saw at least three or four different sea weeds.  Since I did not look at my Japanese Cookbook, I did not know which sea weed to use and so I put in a small clump of thin strips Aokizami kombu and tore some bits off the sprigs of Ito Wakame, and Seche.  Then I sliced two fresh shitakes as thinly as possible and decided to add a packet of bean thread noodles.  I let the soup cook for about ten or fifteen minutes to soften the noodles and seaweed and mushrooms.  Then I added one scallion thinly sliced and after another five minutes, when the noodles began to soften and swell and the mushrooms looked cooked, I stirred an egg and added it because the white miso did not seem to be clouding very much and I wanted a little more protein in the soup.

I was pleased with the soup but the kombu seaweed had not softened enough to be anything less than very chewy, so I removed the larger, harder pieces of it and enjoyed the soup immensely. 

After I woke up on Wednesday morning I decided to look at the Miso Soup recipe in my Japanese Cooking, a Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji and found that its traditional recipe did not use any seaweed in it but instead used Trefoil, which is a member of the parsley family.  Who Knew? So I was closer to the actual recipe than I thought when I added the PPI parsley.  I guess the use of wakame by Japanese restaurants is a poor substitute for fresh trefoil.

I had planned to roast the duck for dinner on Sunday bur fish and veal got in the way, so today was finally the day for duck, especially since I wanted to clean out the fridge of the last of the Brussels sprouts Billy and Elaine had bought before Christmas.  When I took the Brussels sprouts out there was over 1 pound and they looked distressed with black spots of decomposition in places.  So I did some major surgery by cutting off offending parts and throwing out several that did not pass my decomposition triage and ended up with a pretty large pile of halved and cleaned Brussels sprouts.  I did not want that harsh cabbagy flavor so I decided to add five or six cloves of garlic, 1 ½ chopped onions and a sprinkle of caraway seeds to the Brussels sprouts and toss them in olive oil and paprika flavored salt that Suzette had made with the sea salt she bought at the salt flats at Guerande, France this summer.  I placed all the ingredients covered with aluminum foil in a 350˚ oven for 50 minutes.  I then simmered 1 cup of basmati rice in the old soup pot from lunch with its residual soup base flavoring for 30 minutes.

When Suzette came home about thirty minutes later, the rice was done and the Brussels sprouts were half way through their cooking time and I had Pammed the roasting pan. She was carrying two bottles of wine in her hands, one white and one red.  She said, “I have decided to serve Camino Real Winery wines at the Greenhouse Bistro and Bakery and these were sample bottles of Leon Merlot and a bottle of 6% residual sugar muscat.”  I had already brought up a bottle of Côtes de Rhone, but we decided to try the Leon Merlot with the duck instead.

After I removed the duck halves from their cryovac casing, rinsed and dried off their packing chemicals and placed them on the roasting pan lid.  Suzette tossed the Brussels sprouts and took the aluminum foil off of them and added more olive oil to coat the Brussels sprouts more thoroughly with oil and raised the temp to 400˚ and put the duck on the roasting pan skin side up with the Brussels sprouts into the oven for 20 minutes to put the final roast on the meal (the duck halves sold at Costco come pre-cooked, so they only need to be heated and crisped up).  

While the duck and Brussels sprouts were roasting I took a ½ bottle of PPI orange sauce from the fridge and tasted it.  It still tasted delicious but had a slightly bitter taste from the addition of too much madeira and lemon juice in the past, so I went to the garage fridge and fetched one bag of the stored orange sauce sold as part of the duck halves at Costco, and added about ½ of one bag of sauce and tasted again and found that the sauce was now too sweet and had that telltale fructose sugar taste, so I added some more madeira and evened out the sweet and bitter flavor of the sauce and then heated the sauce in the microwave for a minute or two to heat it.

So in twenty minutes we were ready to eat dinner.  The duck was so tender and crisp, we were able to pull the thigh quarter away from the breast quarter without having to cut it with a knife.  We scooped a pile of still warm rice onto a plate and then laid the duck on it and then ladled some of the Brussels sprouts and golden translucent onion mixture, beside it and poured glasses of Leon Merlot and sat down beside the fire place to a warm dinner.

After dinner I wanted to see if the Leon Merlot was good with cheese so I fetched the last of the brie, some Leyden and Suzette fetched some Boursin with garlic and shallot and toasted several bread slices and we ate cheese with the wine and loved that combination also. 

My assessment of the Leon Merlot grape is that it is well suited to the climate and soils of the Middle Rio Grande Valley and makes a really pleasant soft subtle red wine without a lot of tannins that is really easy to drink with all kinds of foods.

Bon Appètit