Duck blueberry mushroom risotto

I noticed Anne Burrell pull a container like this of chicken stock from her refrigerator. It is an odd container to store one's own chicken stock and I realized she and other chefs are doing what I recently discovered in the frozen cabinets at Tony's market. Their staff prepares this and other stocks, chicken being the most reasonably priced. So far I bought four, maybe five, and I resolved this really is the way to go, a much better deal than the cartons and the best part, made right there. 

Oliver's duck/blueberry sausage from previous sausage and scrambled egg photoset. Gentle, the trick is not overcook it.

I do not have proper Arborio rice on hand so Japanese short-grain rice is substituted, among the worst substitutions possible, but I am certain I can pull this off. With vigorous stirring the rice does slough surface starch and keeps doing that  and it does form a rich starchy sauce,  and it does absorb liquid like nobody's business and that absorption can be controlled by cooling, then by adding more hot liquid to loosen, loosen enough to accept cheese, but even if it didn't form a rich thick sauce I could turn rice grains to powder and add that by the teaspoon and achieve the same thing. As it is, feta cheese compensates nicely for this short-grain rice's starchy shortcomings and I am pleased with the result. 

Additional blueberries to augment the blueberries already in the sausages. 

Whoever heard of blueberries in risotto? I might just now have invented a new thing.

It really should sweep the globe. 

It looks almost like oatmeal but it tastes nothing like it.

* bland rice

* butter

* chile flakes (to alter the bland rice)

* dry mustard

* chicken stock homemade in someone else's professional kitchen. Two units.

* parmigiano-reggiano and feta cheese

* duck/blueberry/pork sausage

* mushrooms

* oregano

* blueberries

No onions. No garlic. No beer nor wine nor alcohol. No bay, cumin, cilantro, nor basil. No tomato. No olives. No cream, no olive oil. No sweet/sour thing going on, nothing bitter. 

Simple, straightforward, unhallenging, yet nothing mundane pedestrian nor ordinary. I immediately want more, and it's right there still hot.

Duck and butternut squash soup

Gather 'round little darlings, collect yourselves. Let me help you out of your suffocating plastic wrappers there. 

There. Doesn't that feel better?

))) whap (((

Roasted. Why? To impart layers of flavor. 

By heat and by time starches denature to less complex sugar that caramelizes, the whole lot undergoes Maillard reaction and that contributes depth and complexity by layering vegetable flavors. It makes the difference between a superficial soup and one with depth and mystery and full-body satisfaction. That is my opinion and I'm sticky wicket.

I'm already finished with a large bowl of this soup and I want MOAR!

I walked back to Tony's for chicken stock. I was hoping for cartons and they do have them there. A nice selection too. They are all about $4.00 or $4.50 thereabout, I think. 

Tony's also has frozen broth I noticed but I mistook beef for chicken and got the price wrong. I thought it said $6.90 something like that, and I decided to go for it. But I was wrong, chicken is half that.

I met a woman right there and mentioned all this. She latched on conversationally eager to engage. She mentioned something about a television show, America's Kitchen, I think, and I responded with a similar anecdote. Then she went on about meringue cookies, showed them to me and other items in the specialty aisle and followed me around where I pointed out the duck legs on the way to the checkout. We puzzled over that and I bought more but she did not. Some salesman, I.  

This chicken broth of theirs that comes frozen is an excellent deal. It is the base of this soup. If I had used water the soup would be wan. 

You'd think the strong flavors would be the thing that makes all the soup-satisfaction, duck, roasted garlic, habanero, and they do, but without the base of stock they are all just various flavors in suspension and in faint competition. They never do manage to satisfy and you cannot add enough salt or MSG to compensate.

So for a vegetable soup first start with vegetable stock, that is the same thing in concentration to provide the soup a backbone as it were around which cooked vegetables are packed to provide body. That is, layers of vegetable flavors, roasted, boiled, and fresh. 

Man is this good. I feel guilty, actually, for eating the whole thing and not sharing. I have a whole pot and it is mine, mine, mine, all mine. 

I walked down to Tony's twice for this soup. I earned it.

Risotto, duck breast

Risotto, it is the tale of two pots. These two pots start out exactly the same but eventually one pot ends up with everything and the other pot ends up with nothing. Just like in the Bible. But don't ask me what all that means. What, do I look like a biblical theologian over here? 

Pot 1:

Butter and olive oil just as with pasta and then some smashed garlic and dehydrated onion flakes because at this moment I do not have any real onions and that is an intolerable dearth. 

Simultaneously chicken stock is heated in another pot. This is commercial chicken stock so it's salty. Eventually a considerable volume of chicken stock will be absorbed, evaporated, and concentrated into the rice so for all these reasons the stock is diluted with water first by a good 25% to 35%. A full thirty-two ounces of liquid was taken up by 1 level cup of Arborio rice, and then an additional two cups plain water after the thirty-two ounces of diluted broth was gone. So you can see how flavor is concentrated and how over concentration is avoided.

Pot 2:

Pot 1:

The rice is stirred around regularly if not continuously which knocks off the surface starch and thickens the cooking liquid. 

This is the duck breast prepared earlier. It is already sliced, but those slices dried a little so fresh slices were cut off the remaining lump.

Apparently the unsightly hole is a vein and not a shot hole.

Pot 1:

Eventually one cup of Arborio rice absorbed over 48 ounces liquid. The aim is for the mixture to be this wet then further thickened with the addition of hard cheese. Judging the amount of wetness to finished rice is a bit of a trick and something of a preference. So far I've seen very dry and very wet risottos. I prefer the wet risottos. 

Duck and pasta salad

The idea is chicken salad substituting duck and including pasta. Penne pasta specifically. Alas, for I am penne pasta-less. It would have been all so simple, but now I must make my own extruded pasta. These are not proper penne because they are not cut off at an angle, rather the extrusion plate was used as a guide to slash them as they exited without fussing over the angle. You can see how points would assist in directing sauce inside the pasta, but these will not have points and so will not have that advantage. Too bad. 

ARTS!

Those additions are non-traditional with pasta. Usually no seasonings are added at all. But I do like to overdo things when possible. 

There were two setbacks. The fist disc chosen was too small. It would produce macaroni and cheese size pasta. This was apparent immediately so the disc was switched out.  

It turned out the mixture was too dry. The aim was for a dry mixture because the penne were to air-dry quickly and because collapsing is undesirable as is sealing shut when the penne is cut from the extruder, and because a machine all gummed up with wet dough is a drag. But the first mixture was too dry and the machine bogged down, making it impossible to extrude smoothly. The mixture was moistened. It was also expanded to nearly double the original amount. The Cuisinart was brought out to do these corrections as the first mixture would do best reduced to uniform crumbliness and to have the additions processed completely and evenly into it with no doughy unmixed clumps. Water was drizzled into the feed tube and checked repeatedly until the desired moisture was attained as if starting with fresh dry flour and semolina. The second mixture was still dry and crumbly, but not quite as dry as the first one. 

The extrusion disc was switched to the large size.

The four holes in the disc on the left are dough intake holes. The central post of that disc fits into the central hole in the second disc. The two discs are held in place with a tiny space between them  by two smaller posts and holes on their edges. When dough is pushed through the four holes (screwed through, actually) it is then forced into a the narrow gap surrounding the central post and then out the hole, but the hole is mostly plugged by the central post, but not entirely, so a tube of pasta is squished out around the post. 

Whoever invented this is obviously a perv. 

The pasta tube is one long continuous tube that is cut into segments, their length determined by the sous-chef (moi) who is standing right there, feeding the grinder screw from the top and behind all of this, and simultaneously nicking off pasta tube segments. It takes some eye-hand coordination, and some measure of care that one doesn't harm oneself with the knife, which must be sharp in order to make clean cuts. Otherwise the knife would seal the pasta tubes as it cut them. The whole thing is such fun. Kind of like a Play-Doh factory, except you get to use a really sharp knife, and you can eat the result. 

So there's that. 

Now it must dry. Well, it doesn't have to dry, I mean, it's not a requirement. The thing is, this pasta is intended for a sturdy salad and I would prefer this pasta to be al dente so that means it must dry first. Luckily, I live in a near desert. 

BUT WAIT!  This pasta must be tested. Wouldn't do to go off drying untested pasta, now would it? 

Nyom nyom nyom nyum nyom *smacks lips* nyum nyum nom nom nyom *licks fingers* nyom, nyom nyom, num num BURP!  Num nyom, *wipes lips with back of hand* nyum nym nom nom nyum. What?  

Nyom nyom nyom nyum nyom, hang on, nyom nyom nyom yom, I'm getting there, nyom nyom yom nyom nyom. Okay, I'm almost done testing, nyom nyom nyom. 

Yes, that'll do. 

Mayonnaise is prepared the usual way, this time with one egg yolk and olive oil, a hefty amount of mustard and a drizzle of rice vinegar. S/P, plus a little sugar. No garlic and no ginger, or any other seasoning, flavored oil, allium, or chile, 

ARTS !

Fennel, tomato, celery, pickle relish, sweet onion

1/2 small tin jalapeño opened earlier. I debated whether or not to include it, then finally decided that I do like chile in pretty much everything. I was disappointed that it cannot even be tasted. Wut up wi'dat? That impels me to put another form of chile in the remainder. 

This is the last of the duck prepared for Christmas. All that remains is the broth, which is delicious, and about 1/2 cup of the rendered fat.