duck confit and more

I have been wanting to break away from my usual comfort zones in my cooking. This week I brought ingredients that are for Western cooking, something I seldom do.

In the short term there are three dishes I wanted to try my hand on. Two of them are duck dishes and are related. My plan was to buy a duck I can make duck confit and a terrine with meat from the same duck.

smoked salmon with asparagus

Tonight I have to a bit more creative in figuring what to make for dinner. In the last couple of days I polished off 1.7 lb of hamburger meat in 4 meals of blue cheese mushroom hamburger.
blue cheese mushroom hamburger

some small cooking goals

photo linked to wikipedia belongs to stu spivack

I want to get out of my usual comfort zones on my cooking a bit. In recent years most of my cooking has been Asian. I have many good reasons in sticking mostly Asian cuisines, and healthier eating is one. The other is the relative simplicity of the ingredients. While Asian cuisines are very diverse very often some of the most crucial ingredients are those that are easily preserved.

Funny with the duck confit photo I linked above from wikipedia. I recognize the owner. Years ago when I used to spend a lot of time browse through the food photos on Flickr I always envy the many great dishes stu ate. The world isn't really that big...

blue cheese mushroom hamburger

Today I went for my weekly grocery shopping. This is a rare occasion that the shopping list have mostly ingredients for Western recipes. This is because of the 1/4 cow that I purchase, and that it happened that I have been wanting to make duck confit.

chiuchow grocery store 潮州雜貨鋪

I have been wanting to write this post a long time. I have written a number of Chiuchow dishes. While Chiuchow is a part of the Canton province, it is often regarded by Cantonese as if their are of another province. Chiuchow is located at the Northeastern corner of the Canton province, adjacent to Fujian province. With their proximity the dialect and food of Chiuchow and Fujian have a lot of similarities.

glutinous rice with pork belly 五花肉糯米飯

I often prepare ingredients for cooking without deciding on what dish to make. Most of these ingredients requires the passage of time and are quite versatile on how you use them. Dried shitake mushroom and some other Asian dried food are some examples.

Few days ago I was running low on cooking ingredients in the refrigerator. I decide I would make something out of glutinous rice. I measured a cup of rice and let it soak overnight.

Like the saying goes, feast or famine. I found out that my order of 1/4 cow is ready for pickup the next day. All a sudden I found myself with this huge task of needing to process a lot of cow bones which I also picked up along with the beef. I never want to throw away perfectly good ingredients. I need to make something quick and easy with the rice. A new dish evolved from my improvisation.