confit de canard

confit de canard
Originally uploaded by kattebelletje.

This was the meal I had on Christmas: confit de canard (duck, cooked in its own fat on a very low temperature) with roast potatoes and string beans, wrapped with prosciutto - and a salad to go with everything. The duck, by the way, comes in a tin, so all you have to do is plonk it in a pan and heat it, and then put it under the grill briefly, so it gets a nice crispy skin. I love it! To go with it, I had roast potatoes from the oven, cooked in the duck fat from the tin with confit de canard. Alas, I made a fatal mistake there. I remembered the last time I made this, it took at least one hour for the potatoes to roast, so I decided to precook the potatoes this time. Wrong, wrong, wrong, don't do this at home! The result, after 10 minutes of precooking, and then immersing them in the duck fat and roasting the potatoes? The potatoes sucked up the fat and didn't let it go, so the end result were greasy potatoes which didn't go down well at all. As a matter of fact I felt sick for two days with an uneasy stomach, so I won't go for confit de canard as eagerly in the future... By the way, all the others eating this dish were just fine, but they didn't like the taste of duck so much as I do. Did your Christmas meal turn out as well as you wished?