My journey of cooking, gardening, preserving and more
Lentils have made a serious comeback in the last year or so. Okay, maybe not a kale-style comeback, but a comeback, nonetheless. I don’t want to turn you off from lentils by telling you this, but lentils are pretty darned good for you. Lentils health …
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’ve seen a lot of recipes for homemade dog treats but the simplest and most popular one is for sweet potato chews. So, having a little extra time on my hands over the holidays, I finally decided to make some. They are definitely a hit.
Preheat oven to 250°
Cut sweet potato into rounds or sticks, whichever you prefer. I made mine – well, Buster’s – into sticks. This is what they looked like before I baked them:
Place cut sweet potatoes in oven and roast for about 3 hours, tossing them occasionally to help with even cooking. You want them to be cooked and chewy, without being completely dried to nothing (though you could probably do that, too – I bet your dog won’t mind).
Let cool and store in refrigerator.
Buster really enjoys these, though we’re careful to only give him one (okay, sometimes two) a day. Like any treat, you want to watch their intake on how many they eat.
Have you ever made treats or food for your pet? I’d love to hear about it – I’m hoping to start making other treats for them.
Woof!
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 …
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, …