Canard à l'orange and why not Julia Child's

It's been 2 months since my last post. Yes I've been lazy. Lazy to experiment in the kitchen, lazy to dress up my food, lazy to take photos, and even lazier to update the blog.

Not sure when my next post will be, but here's a French duck stew recipe that I thought I'll share, since it's so yummy and easy to make.

Les Classiques de Camille is still my favourite French cookbook because it's really one that caters for the lazy home cook. After watching Julie and Julia, I had the impulse to buy Julia Child's cookbook. Thankfully, I was deterred by 1) price; 2) imperial rather than metric measurements; 3) lack of pictures. Now I found a new reason why I would not buy it.

It began with my quest to improve my Boeuf Bourguignon, which on previous attempts, yielded rather dry meat.  Since the movie made the dish even more famous, I googled for Julia Child's recipe. So many steps! And an article I found on the New York Times rightly explained:

"Ms. Child’s recipe is not the boeuf bourguignon that most French cooks would make. Mastering the Art of French Cooking” is actually a translation of French restaurant technique to American home kitchens. Ms. Child learned at a professional culinary school, not from home cooks. Her stew’s painstaking multistep method — cooking all the vegetables separately, straining the sauce, etc. — has chefly fingerprints all over it"

And so I stuck to my Camille's much easier version, cook the dish one day in advance, reheat it the next day and made some improvements. In fact, the beef stew tasted the best on the third day. Still room for improvements but I'm afterall not a chef.

Enough of cow talk. Last weekend, I decided to cook duck the French way. Again referring to Camille's cookbook, she has all but 3 recipes involving duck. So I chose the classical Orange Duck stew. Not too incidentally, Julia Child has her own version and once again, I found her multistep method too complicated.

Here's Camille's easy, uncomplicated though not so quick (it's a stew afterall) version, which I've translated and adjusted to a 2 servings portion.

Canard à l'Orange
Serves 2

2 big duck drumsticks
half tablespoon butter
half a carrot (or use one if you like, always good to have more veges)
half onion (as above)
about 100ml white wine
2 oranges
about half cup of chicken stock
salt and pepper to taste

Sliced onion and carrot thinly. In a casserole, brown duck in butter on all sides with onion and carrot. Add salt and pepper.

When the meat is well-coloured, moisten with white wine. After about 10 minutes, add the stock. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

Remove the zest of half an orange (without the bitter white pith) and blanch with boiling water for 1 minute. Squeeze the juice from one orange and cut the other orange into thin slices.

After the duck has simmered for 1 hour, pour the juice, zest and orange slices into the pan and stir gently.

Cook everything for another 15 minutes in high fire to reduce the juice, caramelise the orange and duck skin.

Serve with smashed celeriac (this recipe from Jamie Oliver's website is yummy).

Note: For bigger serving (say 6 persons), use:
1 whole duck (2.5kg)
Double the quantity of the rest of ingredients except use 3 oranges (1 for zest and juice, 2 for slices)

Mustard Chicken, cooked the Rabbit way

We saw a little hedgehog outside our house about two weeks ago. Looked like a baby and it was so cute Rémi couldn't resist putting it in his hands and touching it. Of course, that made the little creature even more scared and curled up.

It's the first time I've come up close and seen a hedgehog alive in Wellington. There's plenty of them here but they are nocturnal. So I've only seen dead ones on the road from inside the car, and will almost immediately turn my head in the other direction. Like the possums, hedgehogs are considered a pest that threaten native plants and birds, so their being smashed by vehicles are not sympathised by environmentalists.

Well, this is not a recipe post of possum pies or hedgehog tarts. I'm going on to talk about rabbit. They are cute, so cute that I refused to eat them as a kid when my grandmother made a nutritious stew out of rabbit meat. So I've never eaten rabbit meat in my life even though I've also never kept rabbits as pets.

But now I am told that rabbits are pests too. They destroy meadows in Europe, and here in New Zealand, they are like possums and hedgehogs. Ok, guilt factor removed, we're already planning to ask Rémi's mom to cook a rabbit dish when we go back to France. It's traditional French dish.

I am also told that rabbit meat taste like chicken. So before I get to try real rabbit meat, I found this recipe on Camille's classic French cooking cookbook: Lapin à la moutarde, meaning Rabbit cooked with mustard. So we decided to try it out, substituting rabbit with chicken.

It's so easy to make, yet so delicious that I think I will do this again and again. Enjoy.

Mustard Chicken (Poulet à la Moutarde)
serves two

2 pieces of chicken (choose your own cut or portion size. we're small eater, so we had a drumstick each. I think thigh or even chicken breast works well, if not better. or use rabbit meat like in original recipe)
2 pieces of bacon
2 sage leaves (I may experiment with other herbs next time)
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
About 60ml of liquid cream

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celsius.

Remove chicken skin. Spread mustard over the chicken. Wrap the bacon around the chicken, with the sage leaves in between. Put in a roasting tin and add about 1 tablespoon of water before putting into the hot oven.

Bake for about 35 minutes.

When the chicken is cooked, take out and transfer the chicken to serving plates. Quickly put the cream into the hot roasting tin and mix with all the juices/fats in the tin to make a creamy sauce. Pour over the chicken.

There's no need to add salt or pepper.

Serve with salad and boiled potatoes.

Breast of Duck with Cepes Mushrooms

One more French duck recipe from Camille, but it is not duck confit. We have considered trying to make our own duck confit, but after checking on youtube, we saw, horrors of all horrors, that you need almost one pot of fat to cook that already very fatty duck meat. Oh no, no way we're going to make cassoulet.

A friend once asked, after enjoying a hearty meal of fatty cassoulet in France, how do French ladies stay slim on a rich French diet.

I'm afraid I have no perfect answer since I'm not French, never lived in France, don't survive on a purely French diet and have not read the book French Women Don't Get fat.

I think it's because French value the quality of their food more than quantity. They eat for pleasure, preferring to enjoy their food slowly rather than gobbling them just to fill their stomach. And portion control. But that's still too generalising.

Rémi thinks that typical French eat a lot of boiled vegetables at home. As well as yoghurt for breakfast, and as desserts. French gourmet cuisine like duck confit and foi gras are for tourists who dine in restaurants while French people tend to eat home-cooked food everyday. The 3-hour lunch and 4-hour dinner marathon feasts we're being fed by the parents whenever we go back to France are not normal everyday fare, but more homecoming reunion treats.

Other reasons I found when googling this topic include: French women are slender but thinks they are fat (while British women are fat but believe they are slim); intense pressure from French men to stay slim (AGREE!!!); stay clear of fast food (eat REAL food); maintain active lifestyle (even the French great grandmother may be doing more sports than me)...

Breast of Duck with Cèpes Mushrooms (Magrets de Canard aux Cèpes)
Serves two

2 nice fillets of duck breast
2 or more handfuls cépes mushrooms (they are very flavoursome. use porcini if you can't find cépes. or mix forest mushrooms. as they are more expensive, I mixed with fresh button mushrooms)
1 clove garlic, chopped
2 teaspoon chopped parsley
olive oil
salt and pepper

Clean the cèpes. Heat some olive oil and cook the mushrooms for a few minutes until they start rejecting water. Drain and set aside.

Put half of the chopped garlic and parsley under the skin of the duck breast.

On a frying pan, using medium heat, cook the duck breast, skin side first. As the duck is very fatty, you do not have to add oil to the frying pan. Rather, the duck fat will ooze out. Cook for about 7 minutes, discard the extra oil, turn the fillet and cook for 5 minutes. Now, duck breast cooked this way is like steak, so adjust the cooking time if you like the meat more rare, or more cooked.

When the duck is done, remove and cover.

Heat olive oil, throw in the mushrooms, add garlic, parsley, salt and pepper and brown for a few minutes.

Slice the duck breast fillet and serve with the mushrooms.

As a side, try roasting potatoes with duck fat.

Orange Duck and Orange Cake

At 18 degrees Celsius, I was told that my rented apartment's internal temperature before switching on heater is warm. It is afterall the standard temperature recommended by the World Health Organisation. The average indoor temperature of a Kiwi home in winter is 16 degrees Celsius. And according to my classmate in French class, she can even blow fog out of her breath in her lounge, if the curtains over the huge floor-to-ceiling windows are not drawn in time.

Despite being a developed country, it is universally acknowledged that Kiwi homes' insulation and heating are third world standards. I read that the country has the worst winter mortality rates in the developed world, and high pneumonia, asthma or whatever rates due to damp cold houses.

If you think that these cold hard truths will make them wake up and improve their home insulation, you're wrong. The standard Kiwi response is to ask complaining foreigners to "toughen up" or otherwise "go home". They sure are a tough species, when I see children wearing shorts and walking barefooted outside, while I am huddled up with scarf, gloves, 3-4 layers of warm clothes and a thick jacket.

Being of tropical breed, I definitely desire to have warmer house. Especially after staying one week in my brother's warm apartment in Sweden when it's minus five outside. So warm that you can walk around barefooted, wear tees and shorts indoor. Well, in my Kiwi home, I wear a jumper even in summer.

So cooking stews and baking will become a favourite winter pastime of mine to warm the house further. Just don't show me the electricity bill.

And yes, I finally found duck meat being sold in a gourmet supermarket. So I was determined to make a French duck dish. My original plan was to cook duck confit, but after discovering the horrendous amount of fats used (basically, you need enough fat to cover your meat), I opted to cook the more modestly oiled "Carnard à l'orange". Dessert came in the form of "Gateau à l'orange", an orange caked soaked in orange juice.

The duck recipe was adjusted from Camille's French classic cookbook. Cake recipe was recited by Rémi's mother from her memory.

Duck of Orange (Canard à l'orange)
Serves 6 (Serves 2)
Note: Original recipe used one whole duck, whereas I used only 2 drumsticks, enough for 2 persons. Quantity quoted in brackets are my very rough guestimations.

1 big duck about 2.5kg (2 duck drumsticks)
20g butter (1 spoonful, you decide how less sinful you want your dish to be)
1 carrot (1 small, more veg is always healthy)
1 onion (1 too, since onions has so many health benefits)
200ml white wine (about 80ml, I just poured randomly actually)
3 oranges (1 orange)
1 glass of chicken stock (less than half a glass)
salt and pepper

Slice onion and carrot thinly. In a casserole or pan, heat butter, add onion and carrot. Brown the duck on all sides. Add salt and pepper.

When the duck is well coloured on all sides, moisten with white wine. Cook for about 10 minutes and pour over the chicken stock. Cover and simmer for 1 hour.

Remove the zest of one orange (or half) coarsely. Blanch for 1 minute in boiling water (a step that I skipped conveniently). Squeeze the juice off the orange (or half) and cut the other 2 oranges (or the other half) into thin slices.

After one hour of simmering, pour orange juice, zest and slices into the casserole. Stir gently. Remove cover and turn up the heat to reduce the juice, caramelise the orange and duck skin.

My resulting duck drumstick was fat and juicy, and the orange slices so soft it's almost like marmalade.

Serve with rosemary roasted potato cubes, or salad.

Orange Cake (Gateau à l'orange)

The recipe was given from memory, so not very precise. I will try making it again another way for improvements.

4 eggs, yolks and whites separated
120g plain flour + 1 teaspoon baking powder
120g sugar
60g butter, melted
4 oranges, extract zest from 2 oranges, and juice from all 4

Preheat oven at 180 degrees Celsius. Prepare a cake tin, lined with greaseproof paper (I was too lazy to do that, and almost couldn't unmould my cake)

Beat egg yolks and sugar together. Add flour and melted butter and zests.

Beat egg whites until it becomes stiff and firm (make sure the eggs are at room temperature before beating). I find that after adding the flour, the mixture becomes rather dry. So a tip from Nigella, the celebrity chef who likes to fling her hair is to take a big spoon of the egg white meringue mixture, stir strongly into the flour batter to smoothen the texture. Then fold the rest of the stiff egg whites gently.

Pour the cake mixture into the prepared cake tin and bake for 25 minutes, or until golden brown and a skewer poked into the centre comes out clean.

Pour orange juice onto the cake, let it soak through. You may like to unmould the cake first.

Serve cold.

Fragrant Glutinous Rice

Time for me to start understanding how to use glutinous rice, in case I decide to make rice dumplings to celebrate Duanwu Festival (端午节), known otherwise as Dragon Boat Festival (even though dragon boat is just one of the traditional activities to celebrate this festival marking the summer solstice).

My cousin's grandma is very good at making steam glutinous rice. While I do not have her recipe, I found one in Reviving Local Dialect Cuisines. Yes, this is a traditional Hokkien dish that my family always have during festivities like commemorating the death anniversaries of ancestors.

I've tweaked the recipe a bit to suit the ingredients I had at hand. And as usual, I'm lacking in spring onion, coriander and chillies to make the dish more attractive looking.

Fragrant Glutinous Rice (油香糯米饭)
Serves two

1 cup glutinous rice
2 pieces of deboned chicken thigh (can also use pork)
2 tablespoons dried shrimps
2-3 large dried Shitake mushrooms
3 garlic, minced
6-8 chestnuts

Seasonings
light soy sauce
oyster sauce
dark soy sauce
sugar
salt
pepper

Rinse glutinous rice and soak in water for at least 6 hours. I did it overnight. Drain.

On preparing chestnuts, slit a cross on the shell. Boil violently for about 10 minutes. Remove the shells and the second layer of skin, as well as any rotten parts.

Cut the meat into shreds. Soak dried shrimps and mushrooms separately until soft. Slice the mushrooms.

Heat about 1 big tablespoon of oil and fry the minced garlic until fragrant. Add the dried shrimps. After about 1 minute, add the meat, chestnuts and mushrooms. Stir for about 2 minutes and add in the glutinous rice.

Season according to taste. As a rough gauge, about 1 tablespoon or less each of the sauces and sugar and just a little bit of salt and pepper. Mix well.

Dish onto a steaming plate or bowl and steam for about 40 minutes.

Garnish with fried shallots, coriander, spring onion and chillies before serving.

Experimenting with Chinese duck

I reckon my stir-fry bitter gourd (or bitter melon or 苦瓜), cooked with sliced pork and black bean sauce, looks nicer, but I'll talk about my experiments with cooking duck the Chinese style.

New Zealand may be too duck friendly. We see ducks everywhere, by the city waterfront, in botanical garden ponds, by the sea, in the lakes and wetlands. After all, it had been a country of birds with no land mammals for millions of years. Until the European settlers came and flooded the isolated island with sheep and cows.

The Kiwis love admiring their ducks, I supposed (well, I too can't stop taking pictures of them). But so much so that it doesn't seem to feature on their platter. I search high and low for duck meat in their supermarkets, but only found chicken and turkey. It's a big crisis, as how am I able to hone my Chinese and French culinary skills without knowing how to cook their famous duck stews or comfits.

Thankfully, the Asians came to the rescue, and I finally bought a big fat and oily Chinese duck home. Made 2 Chinese duck dishes out of it over 2 dinners with leftovers for next meal. Yum yum. Also learned in the process that duck meat is best stewed as long as possible.

First recipe, Duck Soup with Salted Vegetables, is a Teochew dish, from "Reviving Local Dialect Cuisines" by Pang Nyuk Yoon. I felt that I could have simmer longer than an hour for a tenderer meat. I didn't take any photo, was busy savouring the soup.

Duck Soup with Salted Vegetables
1/2 duck
salted vegetables (kiam chye, which is preserved mustard)
2-3 tomatoes
3 dried tamarind slices (assam)
Water
3 slices galangal
2 salted plums
salt and pepper

Rinse duck and chop into large chunks. Remove as much fats as you can -- trust me, the duck is verrrrry OILY. Cook in boiling water for about 10 minutes. Remove to drain (I omitted this step, hmmm...maybe it helps to remove oil).

If using dried assam slices, soak in water until soft. I used assam paste, so not necessary. Cut salted vegetables and tomatoes in large chunky pieces.

Pour water or stock into pot. Add duck and everything else except tomatoes and seasoning. Bring to boil and simmer over low heat for about an hour or more, until the duck meat is tender. Add tomatoes. Depending on the saltiness of the salted vegetables, season duck soup accordingly.



The above Duck Stew with Black Sauce was inspired by Enda's delicious duck stews. She used to cook this duck dish with very thick, dark, sweet and spicy sauce. So I got her to tell me how she did it before coming to New Zealand. But it didn't turn out as I had imagined, as I wasn't sure what kind of dark sauce she used. I ended up using a mixture of dark sweet sauce (kecap manis) and dark soy sauce.

The stew is done, first by stir-frying about 2 large onions and a few slices of galangal. Add the duck pieces, followed by whatever dark sauce. Followed by water to cover and simmer for hours until tender. I used my newly bought slow cooker and stewed the duck for some 6 hours. Very nice. Remove surface oil with a lader if it doesn't appeal to you.

And as we had some leftover egg noodles from lunch, we mixed them with the duck stew. Side dish was the bitter gourd stir fry.

Mission when I go back to Singapore: get the right duck stew recipe from Enda.
Another mission: Improve my photography skills of Chinese dishes.

Of Morilles, Poularde and cream of chicken with forest mushrooms

Poularde de Bresse Aux Morilles is an interesting dish, that gives me a chance to introduce two very French food culture.

First is the Morel (or Morille in French), a very tasty but expensive mushroom popular in French cuisine. I remember buying a small bottle, say 20g for 20 euros a couple of years back. It is small compared to the big button or portobello mushrooms that we're used to, but just a little is enough to give a distinctive taste to your dish. So it's common to mix them with other cheaper variety of mushrooms.

And mushroom picking is perhaps unique to France, an autumn 'hobby' which I have unfortunately not had the chance to participate in yet. It is a convenient marriage of their love for hiking and food (They also have season for plucking wild berries). So a typical French household would have a book on mushrooms to help them identify edible and poisonous mushrooms. If in doubt, ask the local pharmacists. They are supposed to be trained to identify poisonous mushrooms as well.

Local knowledge is also essential in determining where are the best places to find mushrooms, and what is permissible by law so that one does not intrude into other people's private property. And not everyone is lucky, as there are about 30 deaths a year from eating the wrong mushrooms. Read more about this peculiar French hobby here.

A poularde, I learnt today from this blog, "is a fatty chicken that is grown in a particular way to avoid that it reaches sexual maturity. It consists of a young hen which is raised free range for the first part of its life and fed with corn, cereals and milk. Then just before it reaches sexual maturity, it is placed in a cage and maintained in the dark to be fattened for few weeks. In this way, the young hen do not reach sexual maturity, resulting in a very meaty bird (around 1.8Kg), covered of an important layer of fat, with a very tender, moist and milky flesh, but slightly on the bland side". Another distorted French way of rearing poultry, like what they do to geese for foi gras. The Bresse region of France is famous for poulardes.

I found this recipe of cooking "poularde from Bresse region with morels" in Camille's cookbook of classic French dishes. The word poularde caught my eye, because it is somewhat different from poulet, which is a "normal" chicken, and also because the recipe asks for a "beautiful" poularde. Weird isn't it? Maybe it's just a stupid French romanticism for their food.

Me and Remi have cooked this dish several times in Singapore to great compliments. And of course, we use a normal chicken, or chicken thigh pieces, to be precise. Having morels certainly helps to enhance the taste, but an assortment of dried forest mushrooms (which may be found in Carrefour or Cold Storage, though we had "imported" our mushrooms from France then) can be used in place of the morels.

I translate below the original recipe from Camille but give the dish another name more befitting what a non-French would understand and cook according to.

Cream of chicken with forest mushrooms (Poularde de Bresse Aux Morilles)

1 beautiful poularde from Bresse (or a young hen), cut into pieces
200g fresh morels (or use an assortment of forest mushrooms, fresh or dried, or just simply button mushrooms)
30g butter
glass of yellow wine of Jura region
200ml fresh cream
salt and pepper

In a frying pan, heat the butter and cook the chicken pieces without browning them.

Add salt, pepper and cover. After about 15 minutes, drizzle with the wine, cover again and simmer for 20 minutes.

Put the cleaned mushrooms in the pan with cream. Simmer half covered for 10-15 minutes until the broth has been reduced. Serve immediately, with rice or potatoes.

And trust me, despite the crappy picture above, this dish is easy to make, very tasty, even if you do not use chicken from Bresse, or wine from Jura, or mushrooms from Paris (button mushrooms is incidentally known as champignons de Paris).

Tips:
- To prepare mushrooms, cut the foot and plunge them for 10 minutes in cool water to remove sand.
- If using dried mushrooms, soak in warm water for 30 minutes. As the water is bursting with the flavour of mushrooms, you may add them in together with the cream.
- For a proportion of about 6-7 drumsticks, I finished my 30g bottle of dried mushrooms.
- Yes, yellow wine does exist, although a Singaporean friend of mine has been sneered by a French lady for saying that. It is unique to the Jura wine region of eastern France. Can use white wine in place of the yellow one.
- The suggested proportion in the recipe is just a guide. Adjusting the amount of cream, mushrooms, wine and butter according to your own instincts works too.

The colourful world of gingers, and the secret ingredient to fabulous nasi lemak

Until recently, I was absolutely confused by the colours of ginger, thanks to Enda. As she gave me verbal instructions on her various specialty dishes, even herself was colour-blinded by different species of ginger.

You see, blue ginger (also known as galangal, or lengkuas in Malay, or 南姜 in Chinese) is actually pinkish in colour. Yellow ginger (turmeric, or kunyit in Malay, or 姜黄 in Chinese) is more orange than yellow, while the common ginger is truly yellow.

Blue ginger is a key ingredient in Indonesian cuisine. And I must mention that Enda makes the most fragrant Nasi Lemak cooconut rice, and she attributes the taste to the blue ginger.

So I was determined to stock up on blue ginger and delighted to find frozen ones in Wellingtonian Asian stores. I even found fresh ones sold by this young Asian man peddling herbs and spices like lemon grass and lime leaves at the Sunday market.

In Enda fashion, my Nasi Lemak here is served with Opor Ayam, an Indonesian stewed chicken in turmeric gravy. Accompanying vegetables are simple stir fried bean sprouts. And also the addictive Emping Melingo I brought back from Singapore, a type of cracker made from the seeds of gnetum tree. It ihas a slight bitter taste, so I got a sweet variety, that has been coated in palm sugar syrup.

As my handwritten recipe is very unprecise, I adapted the Opor Ayam recipe from my newly acquired cookbook, Indonesian Kitchen by Pancy Seng. Nasi Lemak recipe comes from Enda. Thumbnail picture below shows the Turmeric Chicken done by Enda. Note that instead of pounding up the lemongrass etc, she just sliced them.

Opor Ayam (Stewed Chicken in Turmeric Gravy)
Serves 2

Half chicken or 4-6 pieces of chicken (I only use thigh or drumbsticks)
1 tomato (optional)
200ml thin coconut milk
100ml thick coconut milk (I ran out of coconut milk, so I had skipped this part, but would have been good to follow through)
salt and sugar to taste

Paste:
2 candlenuts (buah keras)
1 stalk lemon grass
half thumb size blue ginger (galangal), about 15g
2 cloves garlic
1 small-medium size onion

Mixed spices
1 tbsp coriander powder
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
(In Enda's recipe, she uses only turmeric powder and pepper, so I'm sure it's alright if you skip the other 2 C powders)

Grind the paste ingredients.

Heat cooking oil and saute the ground paste until fragrant. Add mixed spices (add a little water to form a paste) and stir fry evenly.

Toss in chicken and stir fry for 2-3 minutes. Pour in think coconut milk and bring to boil. Switch to low heat, cover and simmer until chicken is cooked.

Add salt, sugar and thick coconut milk and cook until chicken is tender. Add tomatoes and stir briefly. Serve hot with plain or coconut rice.


Nasi Lemak (Coconut Rice)
Serves two

1 cup rice
3/4 cup water
3/4 cup coconut milk
a few slices of galangal
1 pandan leaves, tie into a knot
a pinch of salt

According to Enda, the proportion of water must be more than that of coconut milk. So adjust accordingly, also to the type of rice you use.
Steam in rice cooker.