This isn’t really a recipe, just a notion. We do like a roast dinner (though John Pienaar might be putting paid to 50% of my roast dinners… another story…) but everyone likes something different. My wife and daughter like salmon, the boys like steak and I fancied duck for a change. Tired of chicken.
So this week I roasted some potatoes and carrots in a little vegetable oil and stuck a couple of duck legs in the oven too. I did them in a Nigel Slater duck salad style: rubbed the skin with Chinese five spice and seasoned with salt & pepper and roasted at 200C for an hour. I crisped the skin up a bit by injecting the fat back in with a metal baster. I then added the rendered fat into the potatoes for extra yumminess.
Steamed some green veg. Cooked a couple of slabs of salmon in the same oven, with olive oil, salt, pepper & dill. Quickly pan fried the steak with a bit of garlic and some bloody ‘artisanal’ bread left over from the farmers’ market. Sliced the steak and the duck and everyone helped themselves. Didn’t bother with gravy – there was a dollop of mayonnaise for anyone who fancied it.
Net result: much less bother than a normal roast chicken with gravy, and the boys are now hooked on roast duck. It was delicious, and so easy. Nice one, Nigel.