Sunday Dinner
On a three-day weekend, the middle night calls for a nice dinner. I have all day to work on it, and there's a day afterwards to recover. Melissa eagerly agreed to my suggestion of a Sunday dinner. She's very amenable.
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We started with a simple salad of mixed greens, blanched and salted almonds, ricotta cheese (left over from the beignet filling), and dried cranberries. The whole thing was dressed in a tomato vinaigrette. Fairly straightforward, but it worked nicely and helped deal with the "mixed greens" bag we got from our produce box.
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I planned the the main course more carefully. I decided to cook a duck breast, so that was the starting point. A citrus sauce seemed promising since duck and citrus work nicely together, but citrus can overpower wines so I decided to go for something a little earthier and less over-the-top acidic. I started with a basic tomato sauce, which I made with garlic, diced tomatoes, and fresh oregano. After I reduced the liquid a bit, I ran the whole sauce through a food mill, which produces a silky purée. It was still a bit coarse for what I wanted, so I pushed this purée through a fine-mesh strainer (the goo left on top of the strainer went into the tomato vinaigrette on the salad). That left me with a flavorful tomato/garlic/oregano juice.
I planned to just ladle it over the plate, but I figured that would leave me with a sea of red, so I decided to add some color in the form of pesto. I actually made a "pesto oil" by making some pesto and then taking a small portion of that and diluting it in oil.
Finally, the side. My original idea was mashed potatoes, piped into a mound with the duck breast fanned out against it. But it seemed silly to buy any vegetables when we still had vegetables in our produce box, including some beets and the rest of the cabbage I used the other night. I roasted the beets and braised the cabbage to make a small "salad" which allowed me to prop up the duck breast. Melissa argues that this "eastern European-Italian fusion" thing didn't quite work. I'm inclined to agree with her. The tomato sauce and pesto was phenomenal with the duck, but the beet was an odd note.
Our wine was the 2002 Les Vigneaux Cabernet Franc from Andrew Rich in Oregon. Our wine club featured this bottle in a recent shipment. It had a nice fruitiness, as well as that brambliness that I dislike in the Cabernet family (Cabernet Franc is one of Cabernet Sauvignon's ancestors). It had a great level of acidity, however, and a nice long finish which let the fruit and acidity linger. It worked well with the food, the brambliness I don't like nonetheless playing off the herbal and vegetal flavors in the food. Again, though, the beet didn't quite work with the wine.
Definitely a dish I'd repeat, though without the roasted beets.
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