Roast Duck with Lavender & Herbs ... and Three Tricks for Leftovers

Sunday Roasts are in my blood. A traditional middle class English background means that I've spent so many Sunday's enjoying a roast joint with the family that that's an inescapable fact, so I guess I'd be bound to continue this tradition. But as much as I enjoy the pleasure of cooking and eating a Sunday roast, it's perhaps the leftovers that I enjoy more than anything. This duck was no exception, and it did such a great job feeding us through the week, I thought I'd make a bit of a special post about leftovers. But first, the main event.

Roast Duck with Lavender & Herbs

Duck is a bit of novelty for me, and once again was I was inspired to cook it by "a woman at Cullompton Farmer's market". I forgot her name last time I bought something from her (Roast Guinea Fowl with Lavender, Mint & Thyme) and now I've gone and done it again! Next time I really must make more effort. She doesn't half deserve the credit as well - not only does she sell great meat, but she makes some of the best pies to be had in Devon I reckon.

Just like that Guinea Fowl, I decided to follow a recipe (well, mostly follow a recipe, I was kind of following several) for the Duck, and from the same "Flavours of the World" book. I've becoming quite fond of Lavender and meat, and this was done with fresh thyme from the garden as well, made into a kind of salty rub that's pressed all over the lightly scored meat before cooking. Wonderful stuff.

The Lavender and Thyme salty mix

Scored and dusted duck ready for the oven

Close up on the dry mix on the bird

The duck itself has been lightly scored to let the fat run, and I'm using a support in my roasting tray as well so that it won't sit in the fat as it's running. This was cooked fast then slow, pretty normal cooking style for me, but longer than I usually do for poultry as I prefer duck either pink or well done, kind of how I like my lamb. It's quite a complex recipe, involving making stocks, reducing them, etc., so I won't go into it all now, but fun to do and not at all challenging, just time consuming.

Duck out of the oven, ready to rest. Lovely crispy skin

Came out pretty tasty, with a wonderful sticky sauce. Lavender's not something to use often in the kitchen perhaps, but now and again it does add a welcome and interesting variation to dishes.

The Roast Duck finished dish, minus vegetables

But then what to do with lots of leftover duck? Duck's often not a huge bird, true, and we had a female this time around which is much smaller than a drake, but you still get a fair bit of meat off it. First things first, it was time for stock.

Duck Stock

The first thing we tend to do with any roast is get the meat off the bones and make a stock. That's one of the great things about always going for meat on the bone, you've not only get a better roast but also bones for stock. I'm not really someone who bothers much with trying to create elaborate stocks, honestly it's usually just bones and water for me cooked for an hour or two, but this time I added the usual suspects of carrot, celery, onion and bay leaf.

Stock being made

To be fair it does add extra depth to a stock to do this, but I had an ulterior motive as well - I'd worked out what to do for my first proper left over dish - duck & noodle soup.

Duck & Noodle Soup

As ever with these things, my leftover cooking is largely driven by what's in the fridge. The meat may be the core of any dish, but it needs other things to make it into a complete meal. This time around it was cabbage & spring onions that needed eating, so I decided to plump for an oriental style soup.

Ingredients for soup ready to go

By taking the remaining breast off the bird and slicing it into delicate thin discs I intended to make a simple spiced soup, with noodles cooked in stock at the bottom, and cabbage, spring onion and slices of duck on the top. Simple as anything to make. I strained some of the stock off and added some Chinese five spice and soy sauce to taste, and then added each ingredient according to how long it would take to cook.

The stock strained and enriched with soy sauce

Cabbage was first for about 10 minutes till it was getting really tender, then in went the spring onions and noodles for 3 minutes, some very finely sliced fresh ginger (done in inch long extra thin match sticks, to add texture and interest) and some very finely chopped red chili, and finely the duck back in for just a minute at the end to warm it through. Lovely stuff.

Duck & Noodle Soup in the office

This is one of my first trick to leftover cooking - you have to ignore the 'rules' of cooking fresh meat if you want to make the most of leftover meat. If I'd put the duck in earlier it would have got tough and dry, but by reversing things and just adding it at the end you get the opposite effect. By using the stock as well you still get full flavours, without needing any long cooking.

We got four large portions out of this, soup always goes a long way I find. Well, unless the Italian gets hold of it, she's a fiend for soup! Still had lots of duck left though, so next up ...

Roast Duck Ragu

The English are pretty keen on Italian food generally, and in a mixed Italian/English house like hours that's even more pronounced. Ragu or sugo is therefore a bit of a staple way of using up leftovers. Just to clarify, the term sugo generally means a slightly more smooth sauce than ragu, which usually has larger pieces of meat and a rougher texture.

And here the second of my tricks with leftovers. When it comes to well cooked meat you can't really mince it up and re-fry it, that just dries it out or makes a mush - not pleasant. The technique I use these days is to flake the meat, creating texture while preserving the moisture within it.

The flaked duck meat

You still need to cook a ragu long and slow, as tinned tomatoes need time for their flavour to develop, but by flaking in this way and cooking slowly in a liquid environment the meat will enrich the dish and not get tough or dry.

I always do my ragu's the same way, the usual sofrito of onion, carrot and celery is cooked till golden and tender, then in with the meat, deglaze with wine if you like, and in with the tomatoes and herbs.

That leads me to my third trick with using leftovers, adding something from the original dish so that you always get a different result, that way your food never gets too samey. For this one, for example, I chopped up the leftover skin really finely and added that to the sauce with all it's flavours of lavender and thyme. Once that's blended with the rest you don't really pick up the individual notes of flavour anymore, but it does add a subtle distinctness which makes all my ragus or sugos different, no matter what they're based on. Whether it's a lamb cooked with lemon balm, or chicken cooked with basil, I think your main roast always ends up adding something special to a leftover dish, which you'd otherwise be hard pressed to create. Sometimes it may be that the meat itself is simply infused with interesting and different flavours, other times there may be something leftover you can add, but either way it keeps you from getting bored with your food.

Ready for deglazing, white wine this time (usually what Italians use)

Now with the tomatoes added, ready for long slow cooking

One note on ragus and sugos - don't skimp on the tomatoes, or the herbs for that matter. I used six tins of tomatoes I think, plus a large bundle of marjoram, thyme, bay and rosemary. Your sauce will be very wet to start with, but the long, slow cooking will slowly reduce it down, concentrating the flavours. I think I must have done this one for about two hours at least, maybe three. Served it with a good thick pasta, and that made supper for the two of us and then lunch the next day as well. Then it was off to the freezer with the rest of the ragus for other days.

Ragus ready for the freezer

These old cheese pots are fabulous for this - they just about contain two portions per pot, and not skimpy ones either. Let me put it this way, I'm not exactly losing weight eating portions of this size! "DS" stands for Duck Sugo here. Our freezer is usually full of BS, RS, VS, LS - you get the drift I'm sure :-) The labels are for ever getting rubbed off, and we end up playing the mystery sugo game - still, it's all good.

So that's my leftover odyssey. I hope it might inspire others to make more of their Sunday roasts. Duck is an expensive meat compared to others, this one cost about £15, for example, but if you consider that I managed to make twenty four meal portions from it, suddenly it doesn't seem so expensive at all. All the other main ingredients, i.e. pasta, noodles, carrot, onions, etc, are very cheap - and the lavender and herbs free - so it's relatively simple to turn out pretty good quality food like this for less than £1 per meal. Personally I'm amazed people think they're getting a good deal from places like McDonalds, I find it a bit galling to see people chucking tens of pounds at those places, and then claiming they don't have any cash. Still, different folks, different strokes I guess.

All comments welcome, as ever!

Gnocchi: An Expert (Italian) Video Guide

Gnocchi, like most forms of dumpling, are a common sight in my house - I love all forms of dumpling, in fact I have a whole book dedicated to the things (A World of Dumplings: Filled Dumplings, Pockets & Little Pies from Around the Globe)! Gnocchi can be tricky to perfect though, so I thought I'd shoot some video of the Italians mum creating a batch over in Italia this Christmas. Like most couples we have to alternate between parents at this time of year, and this time around it was our turn to be in Italy with B's mum and dad, Anna & Elio.

These weren't actually for Christmas day, just another lunchtime - but B's mum pretty much always sticks to the the traditional primo/secondo style of Italian dining. The primo is generally something like pasta with sauce or risotto - or indeed gnocchi - and then the secondo some form of meat with vegetables. And if you think my portion of gnocchi below looks large for a 'starter' then you should have seen it before I got her to take some off ...

Preparing the dough. The potatoes have been baked till tender, left to just cool a little, then passed through a potato ricer.

Making the dumplings.

Some of the finished article, ready for the pot.

Poaching some test dumplings - and a little bit of dog (!) Gnocchi are cooked when they rise to the surface of the boiling water.

The finished dish, together with a meat ragu (venison).

The secondo being prepared.

All in all very delicious -  and somehow I managed to return from Christmas no heavier than I left. Wonders will never cease.

P.S. Just in case you speak Italian, and are wondering why you can't understand anything that's said, they are speaking a dialect that's local to the area and although has some similarity to Italian is different enough to make most of it pretty unintelligible.

The Best Bolognese Ever

Yes, I know, everyone's bolognese is the best ever, but I do have a trick up my sleeve (what great bolognese doesn't?) - the meat that I use to make it ... but more of that later.

In our house bolognese sauce is usually referred to as Sugo - that's the Italian word for any sauce like this. It's also referred to as meat ragu, but the bottom line is that most of the time the sauces have more in common than they do differences. Mine is quite simple really - I always use onion, carrot, celery, beef, tomatoes, wine and herbs. Sometimes other things get added, and I might use different herbs and wines (even white wine sometimes, which is surprisingly common in Italy), but it's the beef that really makes the sauce.

Sugo in progress, with roast cherry tomatoes (and a solitary half pepper in the middle!) that I was doing at the same time

Since I discovered how fab Rib of beef is (on the bone, naturally) I always buy it if I can get it. But it's not cheap - you can easily set yourself back £30 or so for a large joint. But I maintain that it's actually one of the best cuts for thrifty cooking too, because at the end of the day you can get so many meals out of it that it starts to work out at way less than £1 per meal. I even did some calcuations the other day to prove my point, and worked out that a piece of Brisket that I bought the other day actually worked out more expensive than Rib if you consider how many meals you can get out of it! Of course there are wonderful things like beef sandwiches made with the rare eye form the middle, curry made with slow cooked chunks from the top and the bits from between the ribs, broth made from the ribs themselves gently simmered with whatever other flavours you fancy, and maybe a few bits of pasta dropped in for good measure, but for me the very best way of using it up is to make lots and lots of really good sugo.

Now the recipe bit. The trick with the left over beef is to mince it coarsely, and then to fry it hard in a little of the left over beef fat until it's almost getting crispy. Make sure at this point you don't overfill the pan and do it in batches if necessary. What happens is you create a wonderful texture in the meat. You might think it dries it out, but the next stage (after lightly frying the onions, celery and carrots separately and adding them in) where you add lots and lots of tinnned tomatoes, wine and herbs and then simmer for at least one and half hours (prefereably longer depending on quantity) gives the meat back it's tenderness, and gives a wonderful texture as well as rich dark flavour to the sugo. I always pot it up once it's cooled, and the freezer becomes a life saver after a long day in the office when you can just defrost a pot of sugo for two and be eating incredibly good bolognese in half an hour. Now that's my idea of an instant meal!

Fresh bread rools that I made for the left over eye - they make fantastic beef rolls for lunch in the office. If you've got a bread machine you can turn these things out ridiculously easily.