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hapless, duckless (part one)
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February 17, 2002
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My only culinary plan for the weekend was to roast a duck. I'd fantasized all week about crispy duck skin and orange sauce, duck risotto. Duck salad with duck crispies. Duck meat rolled in puff pastry with duck gravy made from a rich duck stock.
Friday night I made steak, of course, because I wanted to take my time with the duck, you know, do it right. No sense in roasting a duck unless you're going to roast it slow. (Actually, I don't believe that. Quickly roasted duck is better than no roast duck.)
So Saturday I get up at the crack of one p.m. and, after a preparatory bout with the Playstation, drag my ass to the refrigerator to wrestle the bird into submission, and I find...no duck.
I'm not sure what happened. I have a great many theories. What crazy events resulted in this unhappy circumstance we may never know, but I'm certain that it wasn't that I forgot to take the duck out of the freezer three days ago when I decided to cook it this weekend.
I put it behind me. Life's too short to be concerned with the effects of one's own incompetence, especially incompetence as deep and far reaching as my own. Instead, I believe, one should focus on the problems one can actually solve. I chose to focus on this one: What's for dinner?
I surveyed the freezer. Poussin? Not enough for two. Besides, any fowl would only make me think of my duck faux pas. Pork ribs? Not feeling it. Steak? Had that last night. Besides, I needed something flashy to distract Rebecca from the fact that we wouldn't be having the duck that I promised her. But it had to be something that would defrost quickly.
My eye lit upon a dark red package in the corner of the freezer. I couldn't read it sandwiched as it was between a huge block of chicken thighcicles and three boxes of Darrell's pepperoni hot pockets, but I knew what it said: "Kangaroo Loin".
I gave it an hour or so in cold water to defrost, then I opened the package just to have a look. The meat was unlike anything that I'd ever cooked or eaten: a lurid slab of purple, with the texture of a firm beet. It had absolutely no fat.
Wasn't sure what I was supposed to do with it. Good kangaroo recipes aren't easy to come by, even on the web. I did learn two things from the web, though: first, 'roo should be served between rare and medium-rare, and second, it goes well with fruit-based sauces. It being our first sampling of 'roo, I went for a simple preparation: I pan-broiled it as if it were a steak, and I served it with a reduction sauce I improvised using port, fig preserves, rosemary, garlic, beef stock, a little cream, some kangaroo blood, and possibly some other things I've forgotten.
I loved it. For one thing, the sauce was unaccountably good. I wish I'd paid more attention to what I did there, because it was gorgeous. (I hate the color, though, that pastel purple color that you get when you add cream to a red wine reduction. I find it...trivializing somehow, and besides, it doesn't really go with the color and texture of steak.)
But the kangaroo itself was also very good. Made me wish it cheap and easy to get. It was very tender despite the fact that it had no visible fat. I could easily eat this instead of steak, and I'll bet it's a whole lot better for you.
February 17, 2002 in old_site | Permalink
