Duck breast, rice and bean mixture, gravy

At the last party here, Bill, a hunter friend, left behind this frozen duck breast among other things. It's large, so you know right off that it isn't one of those little Teal ducks. 

A nutritionist told me that beans and rice together make a complete protein. I think she meant something like amino acids, the building blocks of proteins or something. Anyway, this is red beans and brown rice together as polenta. It's combined with Neufchâtel cream cheese but was accidentally made too hot by the improvident addition of three types of chile powders, one of them, habanero, is quite hot indeed, and now the mixture that remains must be fixed if it is to be used. 

Impressive how the powders expand. 1/4 cup each of bean and rice with one cup chicken broth plus four meager  ounces Neufchâtel cream cheese which is only half a little package equals one metric ton of resulting mixture. Or possibly a little over two cups. It swells. 

Butter + seasoning, 1/4 cup red beans + 1/4 cup brown rice both milled in the coffee mill. + 1 cup chicken broth. Half a package cream cheese. 

I think I would rather have the beans and the rice as separate whole entities. 

The duck breast was brined, but only because it thawed then languished while chilled then I didn't trust my negligent handling of it. It brined in a heavily spiced mixture that included sugar fennel whole peppercorn and whiskey. 

The duck was pan seared in duck fat from a previous grocery store duck, then finished in the oven. 

When I looked closely at the enlarged version of these photos, I noticed pin feathers that I ate. 

See what I mean? Pin feathers. 

They're on slices taken from the center of the breast. And there is this unsightly hole right next to them. A hole in the breast of a duck killed by a hunter. Here's my theory about that. The pin feathers were pushed through the hole by the projectile that killed the duck. Too much CSI? Maybe the bird forgot *whips off sunglasses* to duck. Screeeeaaaaammmm. 

Seems like a rather large hole for shot. Large shot for greater penetration at the same velocity resulting in cleaner kills. Smaller shot for smaller waterfowl. Better pattern density and less penetration at the same velocity. Don't look at me, I read it on a web site.