My journey of cooking, gardening, preserving and more
If you’re looking for a vegetarian ravioli recipe, this mushroom-filled ravioli deliciously fits that bill. This is a little decadent with the lightly-browned butter sauce but it’s worth the indulgence in my book. You can use a mix of whatever mushrooms you like but I’ve …
I’m a bit of a nut about eating a bunch of junk, so it stands to reason that I feel the same way about what I feed to our pets. We currently have 2 cats and a dog, all of them adopted. Our dog, Buster, …
Happy New Year 2014!
My husband & I celebrated New Year’s Eve at Abreo Restaurant, in downtown Rockford and it was amazing, just as we knew it would be.
We’re big fans of Abreo, who catered our wedding, and this is our first time there since their remodel. We don’t make it down there as often as we’d like, but we always enjoy our experience there, when we do.
Our dinner reservation was for 8:30, but we arrived at 7:30 to enjoy a cocktail at the bar. The new bar area is beautiful, though the fireplace is gone, which I kind of missed. As my husband noted, it was most likely taking up prime real estate, as far as seating goes, and I have to agree on that point.
We waited only about 40 minutes before they seated us (we were an hour early, remember) and I can’t say I love their new dining area. It may have been a set up strictly for New Year’s Eve, but it’s not nearly as intimate and unique as it used to be.
We were well prepared for the menu offerings for the evening, since I’m a smart cookie and subscribe to their e-newsletter. They offered 2 menus: a three-course for $50 and a five-course for $75. Of course, we opted for the five-course and It didn’t take us long to decide what each of us would be ordering. We agreed to each order something different than the other, so that we could taste a wider variety of things.
Here are the selections that we chose:
First Course:
Second Course:
Third Course:
Fourth Course:
Fifth Course:
Overall, the shining star was the pork belly dish – my husband & I could have devoured about 6 of them alone and been blissfully happy.
His elk and my tenderloin were the next favorites and temped beautifully. Both were very flavorful and I absolutely loved the coffee flavoring on my tenderloin. We weren’t served steak knives with these, which struck me as odd, especially when I saw other diners with them, but we happily didn’t need them – that’s how tender these cuts of meat were. We each had a glass of Cabernet with our dinner and it was a perfect accompaniment to both of these meats.
The hamachi and caviar where delicious, and I loved the tuna rolls, with its fresh herbs and lemon. The foie gras was good, though it didn’t bowl us over, but we loved the roasted beet dish.
My chocolate dish was pure chocolate overload and could have been split between the two of us. 5 pieces of chocolate was a lot to digest at that point, but my favorites were the chili and the miso, with the caramel a close third.
Sadly, continuing snowfall made for inclement weather and cut our evening a bit shorter than planned. After enjoying some coffee, we headed back out into the snow, and slowly made our way home.
I hope that if you live in the area and haven’t had a chance to experience Abreo, that you’ll get there in 2014. Service is always friendly and helpful (thank you Melissa and Debbie) and the food is always fabulous. Paul, the owner, splits his time between Abreo and Social, another fantastic downtown Rockford restaurant; both are worth the trip.
Happy New Year to all my friends and family. Thank you to everyone who helped make my blog a success in 2013 and I hope we’re all blessed in the year to come.
Leftover ham? My motto is: make soup! I’ll keep this post short and simple. These are guesstimated amounts since soup is a wing-it kind of thing for me and I don’t really measure. The key is really ratio – add more of what you like, …
I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season. I decided to make chocolate truffles this year, after taking a year off from making them. If you have a touch of OCD, these are not a project that you should go into lightly. It’s very messy and can …
Roasting a whole duck, so that the skin is crispy and the meat is still moist, is actually a very simple, classic process. I love to make this at the holidays, but I also make it once or twice in the summertime by using our grill instead of the oven. This is a “wow your friends and relatives” recipe that’s fun and easy to make. Here in Northern IL, the only way I typically find duck is frozen, which is fine, and they’re 5-7 pounds on average. You may need to adjust the cooking time on this recipe, according to the size of the duck and, of course, make sure the duck is fully thawed before beginning.
Preheat oven to 425° Remove any giblets from the duck’s cavity. (the ones I buy also usually come with an orange sauce packet. I’ve never used it, but feel free) Also, remove any excess fat from the duck.
Prick the skin all over with a sharp-tined fork and then place breast-side up on a rack inside a roasting pan. Tuck the long flap of neck skin under the duck and also tuck the wings under the duck.
Pour the boiling water over the duck – you’ll see the skin tighten up, and that’s good! Let the duck cool for a few minutes and then pour the water from the cavity into the pan (you’re going to cook the duck with that water in the bottom of the pan, so leave it there!). With paper towels, pat the duck dry, inside and out, then season inside and out with salt and pepper.
Roast the duck, breast-side up, for 35 minutes. Then, using a pair of tongs, or a couple of spoons inserted in the cavity, turn the duck over and roast breast-side down for 40 minutes. Then, flip the duck back over to breast-side up cook for a final 40-45 minutes.
Remove duck from oven, cover loosely with a foil tent, and let rest 15 minutes before serving.
Ta da! Isn’t it beautiful? Oh, and it’s so, so delicious! In the wintertime, I like to make a whole cranberry sauce to serve with it; the tartness is a perfect foil to the richness of the duck. In the summertime, I often just pair it with a beautiful salad tossed with balsamic vinegar. I’ll admit that when I do it on the grill, I don’t use a pan with a rack – I just put the whole duck into a throw-away aluminum pan and use offset heat. The duck sits in the little bit of water with this method, but on the grill, it tends to evaporate quickly, so it still works beautifully.
On a final note, feel free to pour all of the pan drippings into a clear glass container and refrigerate overnight. Then you can scoop off the duck fat and make some fried potatoes in it. Yum!
Enjoy!
When life gives you hot peppers…make hot sauce. I grew scotch bonnet peppers for the first time, this year. Last year it was bhut jalokia peppers, also known as ghost chilies, which certainly lived up to their hot, hot, hot reputation. On the Scoville scale, …