Dealing with duck

As I have said before, duck is my favourite meat but it is expensive. It is also surprisingly lacking in meat when compared to a chicken of the same size. Nonetheless, when I buy duck I like to make the most of it in order to get good value for money. For a start, when Lidl's have them in I buy frozen whole duck from them as this is the cheapest way I have found to buy it. It doesn't come with any cooking instructions but I know by now that from thawed it will take 2 hours as 200°C. Before hand I push some sage, onion, celery and maybe a mushroom or two into the cavity to add to the flavour. It is also brilliant to cook roasted potatoes under a duck because the duck fat is so tasty. The trick here is to have the duck on a rack out of the fat and to allow the potatoes to cook in the fat but to drain the fat off (into a container to keep!) when the duck is taken out to rest. Return the potatoes to the oven for 10 minutes to crisp up.

We usually eat the two breasts with a roast dinner. If you can manage it, try to cut the breasts off whole, rather than slicing them as you would for chicken. A breast each for an adult is great but we have two small children so we usually cut some of each breast off to give to the children so it feeds all four of us. What we'll do when the children are bigger I'm not sure.

So after a roast dinner we still have both legs and wings left. Later this week I striped the meat off the remaining bird and boiled up the carcass and stuffing to make stock, which I jarred and stored for later use. The meat I divided roughly in half. One half of the meat we cooked up as a Chinese-style meal last night for my husband and me. Whilst I prepared vegetables for a stir fry he concocted a sauce to go with it. I don't know exactly what went into the sauce but it was loosely based around oyster sauce. The stir fry contained leek, shallots, carrot, celery, mushrooms and some large slices of root ginger. Then, once the vegetables were just about cooked, we threw in the duck meat and finally added the sauce. This was served with some plain boiled rice.

Earlier that day I had used the other half of the duck meat to make some duck rolls. These are loosely based around duck spring rolls but to be honest I have tried making that pastry spring rolls usually come wrapped in but have never succeeded. I think the problem lies in them needing to be deep fried and I don't own a deep fat frier and I'm too frightened of a fat fire to do it on the hob. I have tried filo pastry too, which is fiddly to use and has a tendency to shatter in the freezer. So now I use puff pastry, which is not only very tasty, but is easy to use and freezes well. To the duck meat I added one large closed cup mushroom, very finely chopped and some grated carrot. I make these for my children so I like to get a few extra vegetables on their plates without them realising! Finally, I added a tablespoon of hoi sin sauce and mixed it all up. Then I rolled out half a block of ready made fresh puff pastry and cut it in half. Then I dolloped the duck mixture all along it. Using milk to stick it together, I rolled the pastry over as if I were making sausage rolls. Finally, more milk was used as a glaze and then they were cut into sausage roll size lengths. This makes about 12 rolls, which will feed my two children 3 times. I froze the lot. They can be cooked from frozen at 200°C for 25 minutes until golden. Last night I served them with some rice, a few noodles and some carrot and cucumber sticks and they were eaten with enthusiasm.

So from a whole duck costing approximately £8, we had a roast dinner for 4, two adult Chinese-style meals, 12 duck rolls, a tubs of duck fat and several jars of stock. OK, a chicken would have been cheaper but I don't think that is too bad for the money.