October 19, 2014 Breakfast Bacon, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwiches Lunch Texas Chili Dinner Roasted Duck with Sauce L’Orange, Sugar Snap Peas and Baked Spaghetti Squash

We had a rather bitter sweet moment this morning when we made bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches with what will probably be the last tomato ripened in our garden this summer.  Then we spent three hours cleaning the garden beds, putting the top over the pond to protect it from falling leaves and laying the uprooted cosmoses in the new bed on the 15^th Street side of the yard to try to propagate cosmos in the new flower bed by the new fence.

By 1:30 we were hungry so we heated the Texas chili, which finally is getting thickened enough to consider it a stew of the type I am familiar with, in which the meat, beans, onions and tomatoes are cooked enough to start to go into solution .  It took three days of cooking to reduce the chili to a stew like consistency because I did not add any thickener such as masa, which I think changes the texture and flavor of the chili, by obscuring the dominant flavor of the meat and beans.

At 6:00 we started cooking dinner.  Suzette had thawed out our last package of two duck halves.  I wanted to make a Sauce L’Orange, so I found the recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking Vol. 1.

Suzette started by baking two of the spaghetti squash we had grown in our garden.  I split them and she put butter in the cavity and baked them for 1 hour.  Then she took a fork and pulled the softened flesh into threads.

I then zested the orange portion of 3 oranges and then blanched the zested strips of orange peel in water for ten minutes.  While the peel was blanching I peeled the oranges and removed the orange sections from them and put the sections and the prepared sauce from the duck package into a sauce pan and added 2 Tbsp. of port vinegar and ½ cup of Madeira.   The sauce was thin and so I added about 1 Tbsp. of arrowroot dissolved in madeira, but that did not thicken the sauce, so I turned up the heat and cooked the sauce for about fifteen minutes because that was how long it took to roast the pre-cooked duck halves.   The sauce was still not very thick but it had a toothsome flavor of fresh oranges with a slight vinegar edge to it that can not be achieved with a commercial sauce.   

Suzette went to the basement to fetch a bottle of Côtes du Rhône Valréas “Cuvée prestige” ($5.99 at Trader Joe’s), a blend of 75% Grenache and 25% Syrah.  We plated up our plates with the leg quarter of duck, sugar snap peas, spaghetti squash and the orange sauce and had a lovely meal and watched Peyton Manning break Bret Faure’s record for the most TD passes at 509.  Then we watched Inspector Lewis on Masterpiece Theatre from 8:00 until 9:30 and then turned the TV back to the Sunday Night Football game and saw Peyton Manning had pushed the TD pass record to 510 as Denver blew out San Francisco.

We then soaked in the new hot tub for fifteen to twenty minutes and fell into bed very relaxed at around 10:00.

Bon Appétit