Nanny Rhino and the three bird roast

My excuse fobbing you off with my Nanny Rhino entry today instead of writing a proper blog entry?

I woke up late.

Feeble.

So anyway, today it’s about duck. Enjoy.

 

Duck has been a recent revelation to me. My interactions with it have been few but all extremely enjoyable. I first ate duck at a small restaurant near a yoga class I used to take every week. It was Bikram yoga which, for those of you who don’t know, is like yoga on acid. It’s in a heated room and is like a fight to the death, a struggle between good and evil, between you and the heat, to win and make it to the 90 minute mark without having passed out or vomited. If you make it to this 90 minute mark, you feel invincible. Shaky on your legs, but invincible. And really damn hungry! I would wobble out of the class, change and leave, wide-eyed, looking for the nearest place I could get food. I would have taken anything on offer but thankfully, the nearest thing was actually a really great little restaurant. I’d order about four things off the menu, blinded by my intense hunger, not even sure what I’d ordered.

 

Quite often, a total surprise to me, a duck stir fry would arrive and I would consume it in one inhalation. It was so amazing. Inspired by this, I would occasionally buy a duck and hoisin sauce wrap so my mind had started to pair the two together.

 

Then last Christmas, a neighbour had recommended I buy a turkey crown for Christmas Day lunch as a full turkey is really too big for two. So off I went to Waitrose, on Christmas Eve, to buy my turkey crown. Surprise of the century when I got there – no turkey crowns! Well, who would have believed that on Christmas Eve, the shop would have sold out of turkey. Clearly, my forward-planning skills have much improvement to make.

 

I looked sadly at the shelves, which were mostly bare, and spotted two candidates for Christmas lunch. One was a stuffed duck crown with a pork and orange stuffing. The other was a three bird roast; a pheasant, stuffed into a partridge, stuffed into a duck. Noticing all the wide-eyed panic around me, I grabbed both, held on tight and called my other half.

 

“I’ve got stuffed duck crown or a three bird roast! Which do you want? There’s not much time! I might not make it out with anything!”

 

“The, uh, the three bird roast! The three bird roast!” he yelled. “Good luck!”

 

Throwing the crown back on the shelf, I made a mad dash for the tills, holding my three bird roast protectively. A few people made eyes at it, longingly, but I pulled my jacket around it and kept my head down until my money was handed over and I was out of the shop, on the home straight.

 

That duck was one of the best meals I have ever eaten. I made a simple carrot and turnip mash on the side and we used the roasting juices to make gravy and we just ate and ate and ate. I couldn’t believe how amazing it was.

 

The following recipe is another thing I made to impress my brother and his wife when they came over for dinner. It’s a guesswork version of the first duck I ate, post-yoga.

 

Duck stir-fry

Olive oil

8 mini duck breast fillets (or two large, with the fat removed)

A few spring onions

A handful of oyster mushrooms

1 orange/red pepper

Hoisin sauce (plum sauce will also be fine)

1 white onion

1 garlic clove

Thick egg noodles

Sesame seeds

Put some hot water in a pan to boil.

Put a splash of olive oil into a wok and add the garlic clove and the onion, finely chopped. When everything has warmed up, add your pepper, sliced into long batons and mix everything around a bit. Add your duck fillets in, depending on the size, you can slice them smaller, if they look a bit too large.

While the duck is cooking, put your egg noodles into your pan of water, which should be boiling by now and give them a few minutes to cook. When cooked to al dente, drain the noodles and let them sit for a second.

Add the chopped oyster mushrooms to your pan with the duck and check your duck to see if it is cooked through. If it is, give the mushrooms a minutes or two to soften. Add your hoisin sauce in and stir immediately so everything gets coated. Then add your noodles in and mix again, so the sauce is evenly coating everything. Lastly, add in the spring onions, finely sliced, toss everything around a bit and serve, finishing with some sesame seeds, sprinkled on top.

I must just add a little aside to this Nanny Rhino post because my brother, having eaten the whole thing and the main and the dessert, asked, as we were sitting chatting, what was in the duck starter. As I listed the ingredients, he went “O! Mushrooms! I thought that was just bits of fat off the duck and I didn’t want to say anything.”

 

So I apparently come across as the type of woman who would serve up a stir-fry which had slabs of fat in it. I don’t know whether to be a little depressed over that.

My staple diet

We’re going back to my university days again for this one. My flatmates and I were having a bit of a party. I think it was someone’s birthday. It was one of those nights were huge sections of it don’t make sense.

For example, at one point, we were all in the kitchen, listening to music while standing on the chairs and waving teatowels around furiously. Yes. Teatowels. Given that our kitchen window was easily within sight of the campus bar, it’s quite likely that the people in the bar were wondering, in amazement, why the girls in B block were being so crazy.

At one point, one of my flatmates drunkenly said to the other (who was sober), “You’re so drunk!” … She was not drunk.

There had been balloons at this party so after a vigorous session of teatowel waving, it was time to pop the balloons with a knife. Obviously. A shaky video taken on a phone still exists somewhere of me tearing around the kitchen, knocking stuff over, climbing on chairs and tables, chasing these balloons around. Everyone had cleared out of the kitchen, as I was armed and dangerous. One of them hates balloons being popped because it releases the “old stale breath” inside. On the video, there is a little voice in the background going “All the breath! All the breath.”

The finale of the video is me chasing down the last balloon and throwing it gently in the air, with my knife poised underneath it and at the moment the balloon touches the knife and bursts, I let out a short but loud, “WAH!” then smile smugly, although I have defeated a baddie and saved mankind.

So you get the picture, it’s all a bit excitable and silly. Into this mix, we put some hunger. We are hungry and we need to eat NOW, at 1am. What to have? Obviously cheese toasties. There was a toastie machine so we got everything set up, closed the lid and waited impatiently for the green light to click on.

When it eventually did, we were ravenous. So Sophie unclips the clip thing, opens the machine and toasted onto the top of one of the toasties…. was a staple! I still to this day have no idea how that could have happened. As silly drunks, we laughed uncontrollably for maybe twenty minutes. That kind of laughter were you can’t even see straight and your tummy muscles ache and you get breathless. And then Sophie, in her infinite wit, said, “It’s our staple diet!”

Well, we were off again. Up until that point in my life, I think that might have been the funniest thing I had ever heard. Actually, maybe it still is…. Staple diet…. Hilarious.