5 Spiced Indonesian Duck Satay

First off, apologies are in order for my stint in absentia, it has been a busy few months that have descended into a violent heat wave which has rendered me naked and on sofa betwixt jobs involving heavy lifting and subsequent excessive showering. You will be pleased to hear the time spent away from Gloopfood and in between jobs has been done so wisely; cooking and eating remaining firmly at the top of the list of vocations. Oh, and of course I have set aside ample time to get royally pissed off with people, below I offer a brief discourse before the main course; Bon appetite.

In March of this year whilst I was sitting at my dining room table at 31 Mysore Road writing the prequel post to this one, which, having had a quick glance appears to be in a similar tonal vein, I heard the postal flap clatter as what I assumed to be yet another menu fell to the floor. Upon closer inspection I observed four letters identical in colour and size addressed to the four housemates, and with them through the letter box a foul smell had oozed, viscous in consistency, a pungent pong riding atop an odious zephyr. I recognised it immediately, it was the unforgettable stench of estate agent.

After literally (I use the word correctly) months of searching for the perfect pad, or at least one that had four bedrooms rather than three and a cupboard, James, Ed, Dom and I found what was to be our home for next twelve months…. or so we thought. Contained within these official looking correspondences was a letter from Barnard Marcus notifying us that the land lord had, against categorical assurances from them that it would definitely be a minimum of twelve months we would be in there, irrespective of the six month break out clause, had decided to invoke said clause and wanted us to vacate the property so he could begin renovations. According to the notice which had been stuffed through our door, the low level employee who did so making it back to the office before the paper hit the floor, gave us exactly eight weeks to move out with all our belongings. Not an easy process when everything in the house belonged to us.

After a hectic property search which took us right down to the wire and as far south at Streatham and Balham, we were fortunate enough to land on our feet and find a house in Battersea a spit ball from the park. Inevitably however we were faced with having to deal with another parasitical sub-human before we could collect our keys and start our new life together, sandwiched between an extremely busy road and the main line into London’s Victoria station.

Sure enough the slimy individual with whom we had our dealings was essentially a criminal, gushing with verbal diarrhoea whenever he opened his mouth, making little to no sense whatsoever, and frankly treating us like we were idiots who were susceptible to his brazen and blindly apparent attempts at flattery. He was in fact totally useless bar picking up a phone and telling us the address of the house, once there we met our land lady who showed us around whilst we suffered his ludicrous ramblings. It will never cease to amaze me how estate agents will so unsubtly try and sugar coat a house that costs £650 per month to rent, it is what it is. When they start walking around oohing and aahing at a place they’ve seen several times before that is by all accounts totally non-descript, it makes me want to stab them in the face, wrap the body up in the cheap and shiny suit they bought from Next in the nineties, and throw it in the Thames.

You would have thought that after giving the green light on the house the process of completing forms and moving in would be fairly painless, you would be wrong. After losing several emails with signed documents that we had completed and returned on time, he then tried to convince my father and guarantor (as I am self-employed and have a somewhat Grecian bank balance they require more than just my word) that he couldn’t issue a tenancy agreement for our house until he had signed the guarantor form, and that we would have to pay our deposit and initial month’s rent before we signed the contract; a figure which amounts to over £6000. Couple this with the fact that Papa Gloop has been a lawyer for over thirty five years, information that the agent of darkness was well aware of, and his attempt at fleecing really does enter the realm of the absurd. After some probing it turned out that the reason he wouldn’t send the relevant contract with our new address on is because he thought we would go straight to the land lady and cut him out, losing him his agency fee. Now I’m certainly no Colombo but surely all this effort to conceal the address of a house we had already visited, a few hundred metres from our old digs, whilst in the knowledge that our new land lady is the deputy mayor of Wandsworth and also lives upstairs, may have been a little futile.

Now I’m not going to mention any names, as Omar at Next Door Properties could probably try and sue me for Defamation of Character. That said he would almost certainly misunderstand the contract, not to mention that if there is anyone he should take legal action against in this area it his himself. I would also like to add whilst on the subject of accountability that this is not an attack on Next Door Properties, rather the individual estate agent whose name I cannot mention for legal reasons . . . . . Although a hunch, personal experience and popular mass opinion would suggest that the rest of the office and indeed every other estate agent nationwide falls into the same bottom dwelling echelon.

The personal experience I speak of was gained in Leeds whilst at university there, where the standard of housing is one notch below Belsen Dachau. I recall one incident when I reported the -5 degree winds blowing through the 20cm hole in my bathroom wall leading to the outside to my land lord, and he came around to fix the problem with some duct tape and the side of a Golden Grahams box, it wasn’t even the more weather hardy Cinnamon pack. One estate agent had so many complaints they could’ve had their own spin off show from Watchdog, and gave their address out to tenants as on a street in the Leeds city centre, yet when the show went to visit them the building simply didn’t exist!

So what to do then? We are what experts are calling ‘The Jilted Generation’. Why is it that Radio 2 and the press keep harping on about how “house prices are going up and isn’t that wonderful”! Wonderful for our parent’s generation and anyone else sitting on a big pile of property investments from the financial boom of the 1980s, but pretty bloody crap for us lot. Especially when the exponential rise in property prices is totally disproportionate to feeble rise in income rates. It’s no wonder than no one can afford to buy without signing their life away to a 70 year mortgage scheme.

“But the interest rates are the lowest they’ve been in years” Mr Osbourne will tell us.

Well poo poo to that, as soon as we’re locked in the chubby baby and his little red suitcase will undoubtedly wade in and hike them back up again, even if he can’t do it directly I am in no doubt he will find a way, then we shall all be in negative equity and paying off deficits rather than into our pension funds, which he would of course steal as well. The government seem to think it’s a shift in society and that we are deciding to rent for longer and have children later, holding onto our youth and life as young professionals, when the simple fact is we can’t afford it. The average age of first time buyers who invest without the help from their parents has risen from 24 to 37 in on generation!

So again I ask the question, what to do then? Do we move abroad? France? 75% taxation, no thanks. Italy? Essentially a third world country. Germany? Well other than their fantastic wine and hilarious stand-up comedy there’s not much attraction. Greece…….

Perhaps a shift in priorities is needed? I leave you with plenty of unanswered questions and a quote from His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

We have bigger houses but smaller families: 
We have more degrees but less sense;
more knowledge but less judgements;
more experts but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but we have trouble crossing the street
to meet the new neighbour.
We build more computers
to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever,
but we have less communication.
We have become long on quantity
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods,
but slow digestion;
tall man, but short character;
steep profits, but shallow relationships.
It is time when there is much in the window
but nothing in the room.

  

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

4 gressingham duck breasts

Chinese 5 spice

Indonesian Satay Sauce, Ketjap Manis (dark brown in colour)

Mixed stir fry vegetables, spring onions, bok choi, carrot shavings

Dark soy sauce

Toasted sesame oil

Chilli oil

Salt & Pepper

Method:

1) Score across the fat of the duck breast and rub the five spice and a couple of tablespoons of the satay sauce into the breasts to coat them, cover and leave to marinade in the fridge for a couple of hours.

2) Chop up the vegetables and set aside.

3) Take the breasts out of the fridge and heat a tablespoon of both the sesame and chilli oils in a frying pan, place the duck in skin side down and cook over a medium heat for 8-10 minutes until the skin is nice, crispy and brown. Flip the breasts over and cook for another 6-8 minutes skin side up.

4)  When done take the duck out of the pan and let it rest on the side, add the vegetables to the pan and fry in the juices of the duck, if there is a bit too much juice then get rid of a bit otherwise you might make the veg a bit soggy. Fry until cooked but with a bit of crunch.

5) While the veg is frying slice the duck up, place the vegetables on a preheated plate and lay the duck out on top. Sprinkle a few spring onions on top and a few drops of Satay sauce.  

Confit de Canard

We’ve all encountered aphorisms in our lives, imparted by parents, teachers, friends, authors, historians, prophets, preachers, politicians, wise men, wise women. Almost all of which it’s possible to take some sort of meaning and apply it to your own circumstances, to learn, to improve yourself.

Shakespeare wrote that “Discretion is the better part of valour”, amongst many, many other things.

Charles Darwin said “A man who dares to waste one hour of time has not discovered the value of life”. Echoed by Ralph Waldo Emerson who mused that “it’s not length of life, but depth of life”. I agree, which is why I’m seriously pissed off that I sat through ‘Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ today.

“You wouldn’t do it at home so don’t do it at school”. My teacher referring to me leaning back on my chair, a generic comment that all of us have heard at one time or another that is rarely correct. There are plenty of things that I would do at home that I wouldn’t have done at school; and very little I would confine to the classroom, save Chemistry perhaps. This particular maxim I would discard.

Two of the most overused sayings we all would have heard, and as children resented hugely, are the classics - “Good things come to those who wait” and “Patience is a virtue”.

These really used to grind my gears, no child wants to wait for something, when they see it they want it and their pea sized brains can’t focus on anything else. Mine certainly couldn’t.

However now I get it, with time I have come to learn and appreciate the message that my parents were trying to engrain on my psyche. I understand what my teachers were trying to drill into me and why. But I’m afraid the credit for this new found virtuosity cannot fall with either of the above parties, no. Because the time it took for me to learn this has not been the last 25 years in the bosom of my family, or the 20 years of education as my tutors tried to make a man of me. It was the 3 days and 18 hours it took to marinate and slow cook two duck legs in a kilo of goose fat that really drove the message home.

When William Wallace stood on the battle field and said – “Every man dies, not every man can say he’s lived”, it was not the emancipation of Scotland he was referring to, oh no, it was the Duck Confit he’d had whilst traveling through France.

Ingredients: (Serves 2)

2 duck legs

Enough goose fat to cover them in an oven proof dish

(For the marinade)

1 bay leaf

2 sprigs of lemon thyme

1 white onion, roughly chopped

6 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil

1 tablespoon rock salt

15 whole black peppercorns

1 tablespoon of oregano

4 large potatoes

2 large parsnips

1 tablespoon Manuka honey

1 tablespoon wholegrain mustard

A healthy knob of butter

A slug of double cream

1 egg

Ground black pepper

Sprouting broccoli

Asparagus

Cherry tomatoes, for roasting

Method

1. Rub the duck legs thoroughly in salt and place in a bowl, pour in the oil and the remaining ingredients for the marinade, toss to coat thoroughly, cover with cling film and leave in the fridge for 3 days.

2. Pre-heat the oven to 75°C. When the legs are ready remove from the fridge and take out the duck legs from the bowl and transfer to a oven proof dish, deep enough to put the duck legs in a cover with at least 2cm of goose fat on top. Spoon out the goose fat and submerge the duck legs, whack them in the oven 18 hours before you intend to eat them, (7pm if you want lunch at 1 the following day).

3. Half an hour before you take the duck out boil the parsnips and potatoes, mash them with a knob of butter, a slug of double cream, the egg and a few turns of black pepper. Mix in the mustard and Manuka honey and stir through, set aside and keep warm.

4. In the last ten minutes boil the broccoli and asparagus then toss in butter.

5. Take the duck legs out of the oven and dispose of the goose fat, NOT DOWN THE SINK, into a flower bed if you have one. Put the legs on a roasting tray with some vine tomatoes and grill under a high heat for 5/6 minutes until the skin crisps up.

6. Serve the duck on the mash with the vegetables and tomatoes. This is the best way to eat duck in the world, EVER. It is also very nice with a port or Madeira reduction and if you want to go even richer, finely sliced sprouts in a Mornay sauce with lardons fried in clarified butter. I made this for Xmas day nearly died from enjoyment. 

Honey and Mustard Glazed Duck on Parsnip Puree with Roasted Beetroots and Sweet French Beans

I’ve eaten duck twice in the last week; the first helping was in a Thai restaurant in Soho covered in sesame seeds and wrapped up in pandan leaves, the second was at my grandparent’s house on the staggeringly beautiful and equally time warped South Downs. Two very different dishes in two extremely different locations, but what they both did have in common was that firstly, they were off key delicious, and secondly, the ducks themselves were both reared on the Gressingham estate in Suffolk.

I visited their website and was more than impressed; a family business since its founding in 1971 by Miriam and Maurice Buchanan, it is now run by their two sons William and Geoffrey, both of whom strive to maintain the level of excellence set by their parents. Not only are the ducks raised in the lap of rural luxury, they are the only company in the world licensed to produce the Gressingham breed. The Buchanan brothers really know how to treat their birds well, and I can safely say, of all the breasts I have ever had the pleasure of covering in honey and searing in a thick bottomed skillet, Gressingham produce the finest of all.

http://www.gressinghamfoods.co.uk

The remaining ingredients were to be found in Grandmama’s sizeable vegetable patch, still fully maintained by the woman herself and pumping out a myriad of seasonal trinkets. In the picture are the beetroots, the French beans, the parsnips, and my sister’s Jack Russell Archie who tried to maul the neighbour’s cat earlier in the day. Good lad.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

2 Gressingham duck breasts

2 Medium beetroots cut into 1 inch chunks

Handful of French beans, sliced vertically

5 medium parsnips, peeled and chopped

4 tablespoons of clear honey

2 tablespoons of wholegrain mustard

100ml double cream

Butter

Olive oil

Balsamic glaze

Salt and Pepper

1 tspn sugar

Method: (1 hour approx)

Preheat the oven to 230°C

1. Pat the duck breasts dry with kitchen towel and slice lines across the skin horizontally all the way down. In a bowl mix the honey and mustard together and coat the duck in it, making sure to get the mixture right into the cuts you’ve made. Set aside.

2. Tear off a large square of tin foil and create a parcel, whack the beetroots in and season with salt and pepper and a few slugs of olive oil, toss to coat, close the parcel and put it in a baking tray before putting it into the top half of the oven for 40 minutes. Open the parcel and drizzle the balsamic glaze over them before returning them to the oven, parcel open, for another 15 minutes. This will crisp them up and give them a sweeter taste. (When you’ve glazed the beets and put them back in start the duck in phase 4).

3. While the beetroots are in the oven put the parsnips in a saucepan and boil for 10-15 minutes until soft (they should fall off the end of a sharp knife), take off and drain before returning them to the pan, add a knob of butter and the cream and mash thoroughly, add salt and pepper to taste. Parsnips are quite stringy so you won’t be able to push them through a sieve to create the puree, if you have a blender use that. Keep them warm when you’re done mashing / purayin’.

4. Heat a frying pan on a high heat with a little butter and fry the duck breast skin side down for a few minutes until they are crispy and brown, flip them over for 30 seconds before putting them on a baking tray and putting them on the shelf below the beetroots, cook for 15–20 minutes depending on how you like the meat.

5. When the duck in is in the oven boil the beans for 7-10 minutes, strain and add a little butter along with a tspn of sugar and toss them about a bit.

6. To serve put a dollop of the parsnip puree on the plate, slice the duck breast and chuck a few of those on top, beetroots on the side, beans on top, and finally heat the left over honey and mustard briefly and drizzle it over. This whole meal was incredibly rich and sweet, proper Downton Abbey shit.

Roasted Duck Red Thai Curry (Gaeng Phed Ped Yang)

In the summer of 2006 during the first of several periods of extended vagrancy, I found myself (as most of us travlaars do), sitting on a beach in the Gulf of Thailand staring out at a ludicrously beautiful seascape, which wasn’t at all tainted by the hoards of bucket wielding, same same but different sporting, “oh my god! It’s such a small world”ing gappers, intent on getting utterly mind-fucked.

You may detect an air of sarcasm, but you’d be wrong, I was one of them.

It didn’t matter whether the moon was full, as long as my bucket was, and if it wasn’t you can bet it was affixed to my belt as a triumphant accessory, next to the glow stick/s, by my man-bag.

(Incidentally it’s not a small world you morons! If we bumped into each other in Magadan maybe that turn of phrase would apply, or Reykjavik perhaps, but not Thailand. It’s like Uni, but with Magic Mushrooms and Ladyboys).

Me and my partner in crime and best friend Ed, who still retains the mantle to this day in fact, needed to line our stomachs with food before drinking Thailand’s taurine filled answer to Red Bull (which actually has bits of bovine bollock floating in it), and although Ed romanticised about experimenting with the weird and wonderful flavours of South East Asia, the furthest he ever got was a chicken schnitzel. I on the other hand dived straight in and tried all I could get my hands on, the real favourite for me were the curries, and in particular the Thai Red Curry.

It came to pass that a year later I found myself back in Thailand, a little bit older and just as stupid, still armed with my glow sticks and man-bag, but with a newly developed affinity for cooking.

I arrived in Chiang Mai in the North West of the country and set about searching for a cooking school that would teach me how to create my beloved curry – ‘The Chiang Mai Thai Cookery School’ came highly recommended so I signed up for 5 days of lessons in all things Thai. On the final day we were bussed out to the house of the school’s owner, TV celebrity chef Sompon Nabnian, where he showed us his step by step recipe for the best Roasted Duck Red Curry in the world.

I have added and subtracted a few things here and there, some I couldn’t get like the fresh kaffir lime, and others I don’t like such as the green peppercorns. The taste however is sweet, rich, spicy and divine.

Ingredients: (Serves 4)

If you want to make the paste from scratch then do so, you can store the surplus for a good few weeks in the fridge.

Paste:

10 Large red chillies, deseeded, finely chopped

10 Red bird eye chillies

1 tspn coriander seeds, dry roasted for a few minutes

2 cardamom pods, dry roasted for a few minutes

½ tspn salt

½ tspb black peppercorns

2cm fresh root ginger, peeled and chopped

1 tspn fresh coriander root, chopped

3 cm of lemongrass, the lower end of the root

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

3 shallots, finely chopped

1 tspn shrimp paste

Curry:

3 duck breasts

100g red curry paste

350ml coconut milk

200ml coconut cream

4 kaffir lime leaves

1 small dark aubergine, cut into thin wedges

8 cherry tomatoes

8 white grapes
2 sticks of lemon grass, topped and tailed and cut into 3cm lengths

Small handful of sweet basil leaves

1 wheel of fresh pineapple, cut into small segments

2 large red chillies, thinly sliced into wheels

1 tablespoon fish sauce (Nam Pla)

1 tablespoon dark soy sauce

1 tspn palm sugar

1 tspn white sugar

Rice for serving, this is necessary as the curry is extremely rich and really needs the cool blandness of the grain to soak up the flavours of the sauce.

Method:

Paste:

1. You can make the mix by pounding everything in a pestle and mortar - start with the coriander seeds, cardamom pods and black peppercorns, then add the rest of the ingredients and grind into a smooth paste. Alternatively you can put everything in a blender and whizz it that way, you may have to add a little water to the mix.

There are plenty of great curry pastes in the supermarket if you don’t have the time to make your own, Waitrose has a particularly good ‘Foods of the World’ section where you can find almost all of the ingredients you’ll need.

Curry:

1. Slice a few slits across the skin of the duck breasts and season them, fry them skin side down in a pan with a little oil for a few minutes so they get a little crispy, put them on a baking tray in the oven at 200°C for 15 minutes. When the time is up take the duck out and cut it into thin slices, it may be pink in the middle but this is alright as it can be eaten rare and will continue to cook in the curry later on. Set aside.

2. In a measuring jug pour 100ml of coconut milk and 150ml of coconut cream, mix together thoroughly. Pour it into a wok and simmer for 5 minutes whilst constantly stirring, the coconut oil will begin to separate out on top, this isn’t massively noticeable but it does enhance the flavour a lot. I can’t explain why, it just does.

3. Add the curry paste and stir it through, simmer for a further 2 minutes and add the remaining 250ml of coconut milk and mix it in. When it bubbles roughly tear up the kaffir lime leaves and chuck them in along with the aubergine, pineapple and cherry tomatoes, cook for 3 minutes. Now add the grapes, half of the sweet basil leaves, half of the chopped chilli wheels, the chopper lemon grass, the palm sugar, white sugar, fish sauce, soy sauce and the sliced duck. Mix it up and cook for another 4 minutes.

4. Plate up with some rice, garnish with the remaining basil leaves, chilli wheels and a drizzle of the leftover coconut cream. There are so many flavours in this curry but they all love each other, it’s a very happy dish.