The Thanksgiving Duck

Duck is our favorite 'fancy' meal, and Melvin is hopelessly obsessed with its juicy, tender deliciousness. Actually, this is our 4th Thanksgiving duck (can't even begin to estimate our total duck creation/consumption total- there are a lot!!). The Thanksgiving duck becomes a day long event, which we look forward to with much enthusiasm. Some of us have even been known to conduct countdowns to duck day, bringing the topic of duck into any and all conversations for days on end. A duck day consists of many steps: the prep of the duck followed by the slow roasting of the duck, the rotating of the duck and the butchering of duck, all of which culminates in the eating of the duck! A fun day for all involved! Plus, the apartment smells great all day long :-)

Duck Day!! Duck Day!! Duck Day!! Quack!!

You can see the duck we chose on the left: at just over 7 lbs and the largest duck I could get my greedy little hands on, it is a beauty! It comes with an orange sauce packet which we shall stick up our nose to and toss out without further thought or discussion, because this duck deserves only the best trimmings! We bought the duck frozen

on Sunday (we actually had to go to 3 stores to find a duck, because the first two were completely sold out!! Almost a crisis of epic proportions!!), and it has been thawing in our fridge ever since. We took it out around 10AM and unwrapped it, washed it out and removed the neck and giblets, trimmed some of the excess skin and fat, cut snips in the skin and applied the seasonings (we used a Chinese roast duck spice packet from the grocery store). The duck then sat in the fridge to marinate until 3pm. You can tell by looking at it that it will be good eating in our house tonight!

So we put the duck in the oven at 3pm. The cooking progression is: 350 degrees for 30 minutes on each side (start breast side up), followed by 375 degrees for 30 minutes with breast side up, then 400 degrees for 30 minutes with breast side down and the last segment is 350 degrees for 15 minutes with breast side up. It is a long roasting process, but it produces a very tender, juicy duck with a crisp, crackly skin. With the high heat and long cooking time, most of the fat melts and runs off into the roasting pan (snipping the skin before cooking also helps this process). The best part is that the giblets can be placed on top of the duck to get a nice dark color and good crunch to them- and they are ready before the rest of the duck, so you can sample some of the duck to whet your appetite for dinner. Our duck seemed to have extra- double heart and gizzard, we think. Oh well, more for us to eat! It's always exciting every time we flip the duck, to see it get more and more golden in color and to get a whiff of it cooking away.

Finally, the duck was ready! Huzzah!! We took it out of the roasting pan and chopped it up. This part is always really messy, but we've become more skilled at duck butchering with time. The duck was very meaty- the breast pieces were huge, as were the drumsticks- JACKPOT!! I was calling 'dibs' on pieces as they were being cut up- hehe.

We cooked some stir fried yu choy and rice to go with the duck.

I also had a can of cranberry sauce, in keeping with the traditional Thanksgiving palette. I think it goes pretty well with duck, actually. We also had a bottle of the Martinelli's sparkling apple cider- yum!

It turned out that the duck really was a ton of meat- we had enough to pack away for two extra dinners. Yay for future deliciousness!! Happy Thanksgiving!!