Kitchen confessions of a huntress

Have I mentioned that I’m terrified of cooking ducks?

You wouldn’t know it when you read here how much I love the great food that hunting puts on the dinner table. But here’s the deal: Boyfriend’s the one doing the cooking. And his game cookery is immaculate, so I eat well (see photo above).

It’s not that I can’t cook. Before Boyfriend started feeding me, I cooked all the time. And I can make some mean Mexican food, baby – homemade tortillas, fresh-ground spice mixes, intricate moles (that’s MOW-lay – the chili sauce with chocolate in it) and pretty much the best guacamole anyone has ever had.

But that’s stuff you make with storebought ingredients. Now I have this sacred bond with my meat. I saw it fly, I took it down, I watched it die, I plucked it and gutted it and I am terrified that I will dishonor it with incompetence in the kitchen.

Boyfriend has been gentle about this. He never nags me. He just informs me when there’s a teal I could cook, or lets me know when the kitchen will be free for a few hours here or there on a weekend. It reminds me of the time when I was a freshman in high school and my Mom came into my room to let me know the new Reader’s Digest was in, her index finger coincidentally underlining a headline about the dangers of marijuana. Hint hint hint.

And I usually respond to him the same way I responded to Mom: “Thanks.”

But this week I was forced to cook a duck.

We had some leftovers from our big duck hunters dinner earlier this month – some teal brought by one of our guests. We were going to eat them during the week, but we just got too busy, so Boyfriend put them in a brine to preserve them. Then we were supposed to eat them Sunday, but we were all pooped after sturgeon fishing.

On Wednesday, we were approaching a dangerous point: If it's wicked to dishonor a duck by cooking it badly, then it's undoubtedly a mortal sin to let it go to waste. Something had to be done.

So I did it. I set out to cook the duck, following Boyfriend's very simple, very foolproof recipe for roasted whole duck:

> Preheat oven to 450 or 500 degrees.
> Pat dry and salt a whole duck with skin on.
> Brown the duck in a cast iron pan, preferably using duck fat, but oil will do.
> Turn off the burner, then set two celery stalks in the pan and rest the duck on them, breast side up.
> Pop the whole shebang into the oven for at least 10 minutes (more for bigger birds, but we're talking teal here)
> Start checking it with a meat thermometer at 10 minutes. When it hits 135 degrees, pull it out of the oven.
> Serve, ideally with yummy green things. Or whatever.

I followed the recipe, except for the salt part. This duck didn't need any more of that. After the bird had been in the oven for 10 minutes, I dutifully poked it with the meat thermometer and watched it hit 165 degrees. Yikes! I pulled it out, let it rest for a few minutes, then plunked it on a plate to see how I'd done.

It sure wasn't as rare as I like it. And after all that time in brine, it was saltier than bacon. But it was actually good! I like salt anyway. And I was so emboldened by the experience that I cooked two more of them tonight, and they came out even better.

I'm feeling good about this!

OK, I'm feeling guilty that I couldn't work up the guts to cook a duck until it was someone else's duck that I might screw up, and there was a high likelihood it would taste funky anyway from its long soak in the brine. Talk about playing it safe!

But I did it. And I'm no longer afraid.

© Holly A. Heyser 2008