CSA Week 6

Last week was a special week at the CSA. It was one of the few times we could have extra goodies delivered, and I also worked a shift. Working the closing shift meant picking up a few surplus items at the end which conveniently balanced out the fact that I stood in a downpour for two hours explaining what vegetables people were allotted.

Above, clockwise from left: giant scallions, cucumbers, beets with greens, peaches, romaine, farm fresh eggs, duck,
2 cheeses--Consider Bardwell's Pawlett, and 3 Corner Field Farm's Shushan Snow mini wheel of sheep's milk brie,
one heirloom tomato, chinese cabbage, white onions, and cilantro plants.

We were happy even to get one tomato what with all of this crazy late blight and thunderstorms in the northeast. We honored its delicious tomatoey flavor by slicing it and eating it for breakfrast with scrambled fresh eggs.

One of the onions and the whole bunch of beets with their greens got cubed, and saute-steamed--a fun process like sauteeing, but involving a total crowding and mild overflowing of the pan so that steam is trapped by food particles and ends up doing the cooking. We love to eat this with polenta. Inspired by this recipe, we've cut down on meat intake (aside from the duck we got this week) and left out the pancetta and made the whole meal into a two step process.

We ate the Chinese cabbage steamed with hoisin. I rarely feel in touch with my Chinese side, but man, when I ate this I felt so Asian and so right.

Cucumbers have been a real challenge since they're not a vegetable I'm particularly fond of and I can't cream braise them. Alas! We didn't eat either of them this week, but they are still holding up well in the fridge and I have grand plans for them and their newer brethren.

Delightful flowers! This is one fourth of a leftover flower share. A bunch of flowers four times this size every week would be too much for our household, but I forget how nice it is to have colorful things around sometimes.

We ate the peaches on their own and also in rose sangria. Some of them were the peaches of dreams, and some were mealy and flavorless. I should have stuck the mealy ones in some more booze to liven them up. You win some, you lose some.

The Shushan Snow Sheep's milk brie was rapidly consumed on a park bench with more of the sourdough onion rye bread I baked. Dappled sun, sitting, bread and cheese--life is made for these sweet moments.

Learning how to cut up a duck from the Joy of Cooking's excellent diagrams

We bought a duck because last summer I read Judith Jones's The Tenth Muse, and she describes buying a duck for herself and how she cooked and ate the different parts for her meals. It sounded lovely and delicious.

After cutting up this duck, we had:

• very fatty skin, which we cooked slowly to make cracklins and rendered duck fat (AMAZING, and possibly worth getting a duck for)
• a neck, two bony wings and a skeleton, which we made into stock
• a liver, a heart, and a gizzard, which got fried and put on a salad.
  
• two large breast pieces, which we broiled and served with chinese cabbage and orange chipotle sauce
• two legs with love handles attached, which got pan-braised with scallions
  

I had no qualms about cutting up this duck. I've always been freaked out by the plastic bag of gizzards that comes in a turkey, so I was very confused about my lack of nausea with duck bits. It was a similar to when I went skydiving with my friends after we graduated from high school; I was expecting a funny feeling in my tummy, but just felt inexplicably calm and peaceful the whole time. Maybe I felt okay with it because I had read the reassuring words of Ms. Jones so many times, "I consider the best cook's treats the packet of giblets one finds tucked into a roasting bird--and if you don't find it, complain loudly and never buy from that source again." These were very flavorful, not gross at all, and tasted amazing on a salad of fresh romaine. I doubt I'll seek out giblets to cook up, but when I do get another bird I'll be sure to make this recipe again.

Cracklins and rendered duck fat, however, I will crave for the rest of my life. Oh the sumptuous ducky flavor! Oh the smooth, barely solid lipid! Truly foods to make one feel richly fed.

The stock we have not consumed yet. I froze it in little labeled sandwich bags so that I can have a decent portion of stock to use rather than a whole pot-ful frozen altogether. I tasted an errant drop, and I am sure this stock will have the Midas touch on any food I cook with it.

With all of these parts so delicous, one would expect the meat to also be heavenly. It wasn't. I'm not sure why, but both times we cooked the duck (breast and leg) the meat was exceptionally tough. The preparation and cooking methods were vastly different from each other, but yielded the same disappointingly chewy result. Maybe next time we buy a duck we won't get such a vigorously exercised one.