TenuredVulture wrote:Duck is my favorite poultry. But I've never prepared it myself. Is it difficult?

No harder than chicken, maybe a little easier actually. It can be roasted whole, and is a little more forgiving than chicken, because it's safe to serve on the rare side (and rare duck breast is excellent), and also because it resists overcooking well due to being quite fatty. How do you like it?

phatj wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:Duck is my favorite poultry. But I've never prepared it myself. Is it difficult?

No harder than chicken, maybe a little easier actually. It can be roasted whole, and is a little more forgiving than chicken, because it's safe to serve on the rare side (and rare duck breast is excellent), and also because it resists overcooking well due to being quite fatty. How do you like it?

I've had it cooked several ways--grilled once, I think. At Herbsaint in New Orleans, I had Muscovy Duck Leg Confit, and it was outstanding.

Around here, unless I shoot one myself, the only duck I can probably get are frozen ones from Wal-Mart. I might do a little better in Little Rock. I'm going to look around and see what I can pick up. Any pointers?

The only place I've ever seen fresh duck was at Wegmans, which I'm pretty sure you don't have in AR. If you can find it, it's probably going to be outrageously expensive. But duck, like chicken, freezes quite well. I've only bought it frozen and can attest that it's quite good. You'll need to allow time for it to thaw if you go this route, obviously.

I've made duck leg confit myself. It's awesome, and pretty easy if you have the ingredients on hand. Duck legs and duck fat by themselves can be hard to find, but when I did it I bought a whole bird, rendering the fat from the skin and other trimmings and using that, augmented with olive oil, to cook the legs. Never tried grilling it, mostly because I have no talent for grilling. It sounds good though.

If you find non-whole duck (or if you break down a whole bird), the breasts are excellent. Pan-seared is extremely easy: leave the skin on the breasts, and score the skin with a sharp knife, being careful not to cut into the meat; put breasts skin-side down in a heavy skillet over medium heat; cook undisturbed about 10 minutes to allow the fat to slowly render out of the skin; turn over and cook another five minutes or so flesh side down. (If you have a probe thermometer, use it -- you'll want an internal temp of about 150 F for fairly rare.) Let breasts rest about 5 minutes, slice & serve. Many sauces for duck are very fruity and pretty sweet; I like the fruit aspect but prefer a more tart flavor to balance the richness. A vinaigrette made with orange juice is pretty good.

If there's an Asian grocery store nearby, you may have better luck finding duck.

I wish my neighborhood's chili cook-off was a more than once a year event. Yesterday was so much fun.

I'm missing the chili cook-off! Maaaaarrrrrrge, I'm missing the cook ooooooooff!

Now where are my chili boots?

OH MY, The Fugitive is on TNT!

man, i hate that i have to catch up on like 423 pages of the draft and eagles threads. best get startedddd.

jerseyhoya wrote:I didn't study for my AP Gov't test and got a 4. I probably would have gotten a 5 if I had read through the amendments to the constitution before going in. Totally butchered an essay question on an amendment.

\
Well when you rant and rave for ten pages about the government prying your gun out of your cold, dead fingers when you're supposed to be discussing the first amendment that's what happens.

Nah, I think I mixed up the ordering of the 13-15th amendments.

Seriously, if you were gonna go with a stereotype shot at me, that would have been the way to go too.

TenuredVulture wrote:

smitty wrote:

CFP wrote:I planned on studying for my AP Gov test today before the draft. That was at 12:00, so I decided to play some MLB 08 before studying. The game went 17 innings. It's now 2:30. Damn it.

So what kind of stuff do you have to know for an AP Gov test? Like how many members of the House of Representatives there are in the USA? That can be a trick question because yo have Puerto Rico and D.C. and stuff like that.

Do you have to be able to describe checks and balances and the Federal System and that kind of jive?

The later. And obscure stuff, like writ of certiorari.

Writs of certiorari huh? So AP Government tests are like a game of Trivial Pursuits? Do you get the little plastic pieces of pie when you get questions right?

I hit 4 numbers across three sets on Powerball, most I've hit on a single ticket in a while. The stars are aligning for me to win on Wednesday.

I must've gotten a draft copy of the PA driver's manual when I took my driver's test, because I swear I'm the only driver in the state who thinks it's illegal to change lanes in an intersection.

I've often thought that in the really old days, people did things other than watch TV. Now for most people, that time was spent in drudgery--walking 5 miles to school, doing laundry in a creek with a rock, killing a chicken and plucking its feathers for dinner, and so forth.

But a certain class of people had servants for that kind of thing. They spent their extra time writing books like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Grotius's Rights of War and Peace. And they also had the time to read those books. So every seemed so learned.

Now that I've read this I'm wondering why people in the 18th century didn't get more done without the distraction of TV.

the big overlook of the article is that people who watch all of that TV generally aren't the people to come up with the original ideas in the 1st place.

The Red Tornado wrote:the big overlook of the article is that people who watch all of that TV generally aren't the people to come up with the original ideas in the 1st place.

Yeah, but 200 billion hours? Lets say even 1/1000th of that could be reused productively. That means 2 Wikipedias a year.

Funny thing--Mozilla sees Wikipedia as a spelling error. That might take 5 minutes of that time to fix.

TenuredVulture wrote:I've often thought that in the really old days, people did things other than watch TV. Now for most people, that time was spent in drudgery--walking 5 miles to school, doing laundry in a creek with a rock, killing a chicken and plucking its feathers for dinner, and so forth.

But a certain class of people had servants for that kind of thing. They spent their extra time writing books like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Grotius's Rights of War and Peace. And they also had the time to read those books. So every seemed so learned.

Now that I've read this I'm wondering why people in the 18th century didn't get more done without the distraction of TV.

Don't get sucked in by the counting stats. There were 9 times more people in 2000 than in 1750. 8)

Bucky wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:I've often thought that in the really old days, people did things other than watch TV. Now for most people, that time was spent in drudgery--walking 5 miles to school, doing laundry in a creek with a rock, killing a chicken and plucking its feathers for dinner, and so forth.

But a certain class of people had servants for that kind of thing. They spent their extra time writing books like Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, or Grotius's Rights of War and Peace. And they also had the time to read those books. So every seemed so learned.

Now that I've read this I'm wondering why people in the 18th century didn't get more done without the distraction of TV.

Don't get sucked in by the counting stats. There were 9 times more people in 2000 than in 1750. 8)

Right. But a small group of smart people had lives organized in such a way as to promote maximum intellectual output. Now, they did not have word processors. But they typically did not have families, and they had servants looking after their daily needs. So, a handful of people could put out a lot of work.

I am proud to proclaim that I do not watch 200 billion hours of TV per year. Not even a population adjusted 22 billion hours.

I think I deserve a trophy.





... or at least a trophy wife.

I just got buffer overrun terminations on both my desktop and laptop from an app I have installed on both. It's been installed for a while now, and has never happened before. I'm thinking there's some kind of security risk here....I think I need to reboot right now....