Duck Breasts with Fig and Ginger Sauce

Wednesday December 5

We bought a whole duck at Luken's on Saturday. Holt's take on duck is that, like most fowls, it has parts (the breast) that get cooked much more quickly than other parts (the legs). So instead of roasting it whole, he takes the breast off for the first meal, bones out the legs for a second one, and puts the rest of the carcass in the soup pot for a third. Lucky that Barbara got him a neat new 3.5 inch paring knife for Chanukah (to avoid the evil omen of giving a knife, he paid her in Chanukah gelt). He zipped through the boning with ease and grace - if you can be graceful when adorned with duck fat.

He wanted to use his birthday gift from Barbara too, a cute little Emirilware saucier (saucier than what, you may ask? Saucier than Emiril, I hope). In browsing through Epicurious, he had found a recipe for duck breasts with wild mushrooms in a fig and ginger sauce, but as it happened, his sister Becky had just given him a jar of fig and ginger preserves for his birthday. So all the birthday gifts came together, and made the recipe into even more of a snap.

The duck breasts were dusted with salt and fried (skin side first, then not-skin side) in butter, assisted by their own renderings. When they were just medium rare, they were set aside to rest.

In the saucier, a few Tablespoons of fig and ginger preserve were melted down in a bit of the duck fat and brown bits , then loosened up with a little Port (we're using Jonesy currently - we're not Port snobs, and the Australian stuff often tastes great), and reduced till nice and thick.

For the requisite vedge, in another pan, the last of Barbara's garden fennel was sautéed in our usual fashion.

We plated out the fennel, sliced the duck breasts, and adorned with the sweet fruity sauce. Results looked stunning and tasted even better.