Fuck Dat

"Shark Puddle" I said, reading the sign for the bus around the park. Yes, I'm prone to spoonerisms, the best ones surprising me as I hear them jump out of my mouth.

Duck fat is one of my favorite ingredients. The drippings from a good crispy duck go into a jar in the fridge. If there is any waste skin left over from cooking or eating duck, it gets rendered down into yummy cracklings and the iota of fat is added to my jar. When I have enough I make duck confit, which needs to be submerged in fat while it cooks. But it does not absorb much fat while cooking, so usually I soon have enough to make the next batch. 

But this time I made duck rillettes. It just sort of happened. I had bought six duck legs to make for 

dinner, but we ended up going out. Then a couple of days later I was hungry at the farmers' market and bought some olive bread and duck rillettes to have something to eat right away. I thought "I can do that".

So I went home and did a little research on the trusty interwebs and plunked those tasty waterfowl limbs into a pot of fat with a couple of bay leaves. (I know I should have brined them first, but this was a first approximation. I didn't expect to need it to keep over the winter.) When they were well cooked I picked the meat off the bones and ran it through the electric mixer with a fair amount of plum brandy and some salt.

I ended up with quite a bit more than I was going to eat soon, and was worried that it was not salty enough to keep a long time. So I take it to pot lucks and folks ask whether I studied cooking in the South of France.

But between the fat blended in and the fat on top of the jars to seal the rillettes from the air while it aged I had no fat left.

Fuck dat.