Grilled Duck Breasts with Tomato and Fresh Mozzarella Salad

Just me and younger daughter at home the other night. The tomato was a lovely large specimen from Atkinson Farm by way of Revival Market on Heights Blvd.

Ingredients

1 duck breast per person, preferably pastured. Ours came from Countryside Farms

Ripe, summer tomatoes

Fresh ball/s of mozzarella

Fresh basil leaves

Sea salt

Freshly ground black pepper

Extra virgin olive oil

Method

Magrets de canard or duck breasts

Slit the fat about 1 cm apart on the duck breasts and sprinkle both sides with sea salt and black pepper. 

Preheat your griddle pan. Let it get screeching hot and then put the duck, fat side down, for 3 minutes, uncovered. The fat will begin rendering from the skin so you may need to put a splatter guard over the pan to keep it from spitting fat everywhere.

When your 3-minute timer goes off, flip the breasts and push the timer for another 3 minutes.  Cover the pan with a loose fitting lid.  

When the time has reached 1.5 minutes, turn the fire down to medium. When the timer goes off, turn the duck breasts skin side up again and set the time for 3 more minutes.  Cook with the lid off for 1.5 minutes and then put the lid back on for the rest of the time. When the timer goes off, remove the breasts to a cutting board and cover with the pan lid. Let them sit for about 3-5 minutes. Slice thinly at an angle and serve.

Terrible photo but you get the idea.

Tomato Salad

Slice the tomato in quarter-inch slices and lay all around the plate.  Cut those slices in half again, if they will fit your plate better. Sprinkle sparingly with sea salt. Slice the fresh mozzarella ball and place one slice of cheese of each slice of tomato. Sprinkle a little more sea salt and a few grinds of pepper. Add small leaves of basil or chopped leaves of basil on top of the cheese and tomato slices.  Drizzle with extra virgin olive oil and serve.

Courgette Polpettes

My new favorite thing is the Jamie Oliver magazine. Okay, not so new since I have been buying it for the last couple of years and have a complete collection from Issue No 1, except for a couple I missed because they just didn’t bring them to Singapore and KL and no one I knew was traveling to the UK.  I say new favorite thing because I just bought Issue No 20 with my iPad as an iPad app. It is wonderful!  I came across this recipe and had to make it with the one large zucchini I got in my last share basket from Central City Co-op.  Courgette is, of course, the British word for zucchini.

Adapted from Jamie magazine

Ingredients

2 tbsp olive oil

250g (8 oz.) courgette/zucchini (I used the one good-sized one you see here on the left)

1 clove garlic

1 egg, lightly beaten

4 heaping tbsp freshly grated Parmesan

3/4 cup of grated mozzarella

1 slice of whole grain bread

1 tbsp chopped parsley

Freshly ground black pepper and sea salt, to taste

METHOD

Preheat the oven to 200ºC (400ºF.)  Peel the zucchini and chop into little bitty squares. 

Heat oil in a large frying pan over a medium-high heat and fry the zucchini for about 10 minutes, until tender and golden. Set aside to cool a little. 

Whizz the egg, bread and garlic around in a food processor, and then combine with all the other ingredients to make a thick, sticky mixture. 

That mush is the egg, bread and garlic.

With the cheese piled on.

Everything mixed together.

Season if you like with black pepper and a little sea salt, remembering that the cheese will add salt, so be careful. If you don’t have a food processor, use breadcrumbs in place of the slice of bread and mince your garlic very finely before mixing the egg and all the other ingredients.

Drizzle a little olive oil in your baking tray.  Spread around with your hands. Do not wash them as the oil will help with the next step. Using a spoon, drop blobs of the mixture onto your pan and, one at a time, roll gently into balls in your oily palms and place them back in the pan. 

Bake for about 15 minutes, until golden. Serve warm with a dipping sauce of spiced yogurt, if desired.

Very tasty!  Enjoy!

Pesto Pizza

As I mentioned the other night when I made pesto from my overgrown basil plants, I had leftover pesto at the end of our pasta dish. Here’s a simple pizza dough recipe that goes great with leftover pesto and mozzarella to make delicious homemade pizza in just about the time it takes Domino’s to deliver.

Ingredients 
For dough enough for two regular crust (12 in or 30cm) or three thin crust pizzas

1 package (¼ oz.) active dry yeast (I use Fleishmann’s Rapid Rise.)

About 4½ cups or 560g all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 1/2 cups or 355ml warm water

1 tablespoon olive oil - coat the bowl during rising

For toppings:
Leftover pesto - homemade or otherwise
Mozzarella cheese - amounts will vary with taste and number of pizzas you make

Or make a more traditional traditional pizza with tomato sauce and toppings such as pepperoni, olives, etc.

Method

In a large bowl, combine yeast, 2 cups of flour and 1 teaspoon salt. In a microwaveable measuring pitcher or a saucepan, heat water until very warm (120 ºF - 130 ºF – it should be pretty hot but you should be able to hold your finger in it for a count of 10 without pain.)

With mixer at low speed, just blend water into dry ingredients. At medium speed, beat two minutes, occasionally scraping bowl with rubber spatula. Beat in ½ cup of flour to make a thick batter.

Beat two minutes more. Stir in about 1½ cups of flour to make a soft dough.

Knead dough by hand or with a bread hook for a few minutes. Pour a little olive oil in the bowl and put the dough in to rest for 15 minutes (if using Rapid Rise yeast) or to rise for 30-45 minutes (if using regular yeast – but then all promises of a 30-minute delivery are off.)

If using Rapid Rise, at this point preheat your oven to 450ºF or 230ºC.  (If you are using one, put your pizza stone in while the oven is still cold.)

Ready to rest for 15 minutes

Risen and ready to punch down and roll out

Your dough is now ready to punch down and roll out to top and make two 12-inch pizzas! (Or three, if you like the crust thin.) 

My usual instructions say to make sure to oil your pans first, to make the bottom bake up crunchy but I tried something new this time. Finally, I have a kitchen item that I have been wanting: a baker's peel. I bought it online at the Bakers’ Catalogue, which is connected to King Arthur flour and this was the first time I attempted to use it.

Add flour to the counter top and roll the pizza dough out, 

Transferred the dough by the rolling pin to the peel, which I sprinkled with cornmeal. (See note below if you don't have a pizza peel.) 

At this point add the pesto and spread it around. 

Then add the mozzarella liberally to the top.  

Very liberally

With a quick flick of your arm, quickly transfer the pizza to the baking stone that is in the preheated oven and bake for 10-15 minutes.

NOTE: If you don’t have a peel but would still like to use a baking stone, put your rolled dough on the greased underside of your baking tray so it is on a completely flat surface. Add your toppings and pop the whole thing in the oven on top of the stone.

After just a few minutes, perhaps as many as five, remove the tray from the oven and run a long knife around under the pizza to make sure it is loose, then slide the pizza off the tray straight onto the baking stone. Those few minutes of cooking harden the underside enough to unstick it from the pan. 

When your pizza crust is browned and the cheese is golden and melted, the pizza is done. Remove it from the oven and place on a cutting board. Divide into slices with a sharp knife or pizza cutter. 

We actually made three thin crust pizzas. Not all show here. 

Enjoy! 

Eggplant Something I can't pronounce (Papoutzakia)

Okay, it’s Eggplant Papoutzakia.

and that is the link to the recipe from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle written by Barbara Kingsolver, with her husband, Steven L. Hopp and, daughter, Camille Kingsolver.  I first read this wonderful book more than three years ago when I was living in Singapore.  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is about one family’s experiment with growing their own food and living off the land for one year and only buying what they could not raise or grow from local farms in their New England area.  It is all about the advantages (personal health, earth health) of being a locavore, that is, someone who eats food found, grown or raised within 100 miles or fewer of his or her home.

If you have every lived in Singapore, you know that not much is grown on the actual island. (There is a goat farm that I could buy fresh milk from, but that is another cheesy post altogether.)  Much comes from nearby Malaysia, though perhaps not within 100 miles, so living by the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle standards was hard to achieve but it did make me more aware of produce and the distances it traveled to be on my plate and I tried to make more reasonable choices when I could.  

Fast forward three years and we are back in Malaysia. Local produce is much easier to come by, although I must confess to succumbing to the allure of the occasional golden-red-skinned nectarine or small punnet of raspberries, both of which certainly are not grown here. Once again, it’s about making better choices as much as possible.

So on to today’s recipe. Eggplant Papoutzakia.  My mom came across the recipe while flipping through my copy of the book (elder daughter was reading it and left it lying around) and, being a lover of eggplant, she asked if we could try it. My policy is that I am happy to cook anytime, anywhere for just about anyone, if they will come up with the menu.

Ingredients

2 lb. eggplant
Olive oil
2 medium onions, garlic to taste (I used four cloves.)
2 large tomatoes, diced
2 tsp. nutmeg
Salt and pepper to taste
6 oz. grated mozzarella (I used about eight ounces and sliced it into little pieces which I cast randomly and, I like to think, attractively about the top.)

Method

Slice eggplant lengthwise and sauté lightly in olive oil. Remove from skillet and arrange in a baking dish. I cut my eggplant into many slices and browned them all in a non-stick skillet with just a bit of olive oil for each batch.  I stacked them on a big platter until all were browned and I was ready to assemble the dish. 

Chop onions and garlic and sauté in olive oil. Add diced tomato and spices and mix thoroughly. My family is not a lover of onion chunks so I let this cook down like a good spaghetti sauce, until there was no crunch left at all. I also added a teaspoon of sugar to counter the acid in the canned tomato.  I let it cool for a little bit, then pureed it in the blender. 

Spread mixture over the eggplants and sprinkle an even layer of cheese over top. I oiled the bottom of my lasagna dish with olive oil and spread a bit of the sauce around first. Then, I added the eggplant, the rest of the sauce and then the cheese in the aforementioned attractive manner.  

 Bake at 350 for 20 minutes, until golden on top.

Enjoy!

If you are interested in finding locally grown foods in your area of the United States, check out this link. Buy mostly what is in season in your growing area and you are more likely to be buying local produce.