Guest blogger Aidan cooks Confit de Canard!

Aidan is sharing the love!

I recently had the pleasure to meet Aidan from Conjugating Irregular Verbs down at the Blogapalooza in Aix-En-Provence. She organized the whole thing! Aidan is great, vibrant, and fun. I am in deep admiration of her and her husband who decided to live their dream; they moved to France several years ago and have been winging it ever since! Aidan is an excellent cook, each Sunday she does a Seasonal Sunday blog, sharing her yummy recipes. Therefore, how apropos that she be featured as a guest blogger on Sunday where she shares her recipe for Confit de Canard (one of my favorites). Enjoy!

Blogapalooza in Aix, Aidan on the right.

Confit de Canard

by

Aidan

When Charley asked me to write about one of my favorite French things the hardest part was thinking of just one. Everyone knows about the cheese, wine, beauty and sublime frustration of the language and Charley gives us all wonderfully engaging glimpses into history, art and film.

You may not be surprised to know that I’ve chosen to tell you about food and what I’ve learned about myself from living in a place where food is art as much as sustenance, where eating is a shared ritual and where time can stand still for two hours for the sheer pleasure of feeding your body and spirit. I’ve always loved cooking for my family; from menu planning to experimenting with what I’ve got in the pantry. It’s fun to try new things when food is so delicious and brings so much joy to the table. And the best part is sharing it with friends and family.

We recently had American friends offer to come over and prepare something I’ve never made or had before—confit de canard. They brought everything they needed to prepare a delicious lunch; down to the apples and pastry for the tarte au pomme.

Confit de canard is duck thighs. Duck thighs preserved in congealed duck fat. In France you can buy big, circular tins of this at any grocery store. It’s as ubiquitous as wine. In the US and other places it may be harder to find and very expensive if you do. It’s worth a try though, it really is.

You can also make it yourself from scratch, cutting up the duck, cooking it and preserving it yourself from the comfort of your kitchen. I’ve found a recipe for that here if you want to feel like you’ve really accomplished something.

There’s a lot of fat. It’s not a bad thing. Stay with me. What the fat does is imbue the duck with a moistness and richness you can’t imagine. The French use these duck thighs in one of my favorite dishes, cassoulet, so I’d had it in that before. But in cassoulet it’s cooked with sausages and white beans in stew form so the fat sort of melts into the dish and adds a richness of flavor. (You should try this too.)

For the confit de canard Mr America cooked for us, it was all duck, all the time. I can only describe it as duck bacon for it was cooked crispy, crispy on the outside while the inside stayed succulent and warm. Divine.

Here’s how you prepare it: first, you remove the duck thighs from the fat, count on two thighs per person for a big meal and you’ll have more than enough….it is rich. Then you scrape all the excess fat off each thigh and put them in a skillet. Have a bowl or jug at the ready for the rendered fat because as you warm the thighs to a crisp the fat will continue to melt off. A lot. Don’t think of it as fat or as gross. Instead think of it as flavor, richness; a sometimes delicacy. The trick is not to overcook it because it is already cooked before it’s nestled under all its fat in that big, round tin.

What you want to do is crisp the skin and warm the inside. Mr America crisped it good, real good. Like bacon.

While all this was happening they roasted potatoes, parsnips, and butternut squash. In duck fat. Plus, fresh thyme and rosemary.

For dessert Ma Fille was in charge of the tarte au pomme. Simply made with a prepared pastry crust, there’s an entire section of all varieties of these in the refrigerated aisle, applesauce and sliced apples with a sprinkle of cinnamon. Nothing heavy will do after a meal of confit de canard.

It was one of the nicest lunches I’ve ever had. We had a bottle of wine, ate leisurely and then went for a long walk and run around with the kids afterwards. Trés French.

This is what I love about France. Meeting new friends who will come over and make a delicious lunch for me, trying something that French people grow up with but is different from my cultural past, learning how to prepare a new meal, spending an hour together in preparation of the meal and then another hour eating it together, having the children try something new and enjoy it and coming back home after a long post déjeuner walk to a warm fire in the fireplace.

This is the winter version of my French love. The summer version will be similar only with a lighter meal, a longer walk, and a dip in the pool instead of sitting in front of a warm fire. Can you tell that I love France? Bien sur!

Love, Aidan