The l'orange to my Duck

Just as I was pottering about the house all unaware, my love comes home an hour early with a bag of surprises and made my day.  It's a national holiday in Switzerland tomorrow (Auffahrt) and he got off from work until Monday!  He brought with him some oranges and a big duck breast. My smile was huuuuge !!! His plan was to make Duck a l'Orange.  It's the second time we made it together - would have been the 3rd but we had trouble tracking down the Duck breast on the North shore in Louisiana back in January 2010.

He also brought something very special just for me, the "Schnügel des Tages".  Every day in the free Swiss newspaper, the 'Blick am Abend" there is a cute photo of a pet.  Today it was a little turtle which is as big a 5 rappen coin !

This little guy found a home on my fridge

Common occurrence: cooking in pjamas

Note my dad's fancy juicer contraption in the background

So here is what we needed for a romantic meal for 2:

1 large duck breast (or two if you're hungry)

66g (1/3 cup of castor sugar)

2 tablespoons of white wine vinegar

1 cup of chicken stock

1 big cup of juice from fresh oranges (we used 2)

the peel of 1/2 an orange

1 tablespoon of flour

1 tablespoon of soft butter

salt

Firstly to make the sauce, put the sugar & vinegar in a saucepan on medium heat.  You want to let this simmer down from bubbly clear (2) into a deep caramel colour (3).  Keep stirring so it doesn't stick. Take off the heat & add the orange juice. It will spit at you and make noise and the sugar mix will appear to solidify, but don't worry,  it's normal.  Put back on the heat and shortly after add the peel & stock and whisk. Keep this on a low temperature during the next step.

Now we can concentrate on the meat.  Make sure to remove any pieces of white fat from the fleshy side of the meat.  These will prevent the duck from being as succulent as can be (see my love in image 4). Then turn over & score the fat (5),  this will allow the heat to reach the meat more easily and promote crispiness.  Salt all over & pop on a hot pan fat side down (no oil needed as you get enough from the meat).  Cook for about 3 min or a little longer if the breast is big, then turn over and cook for about a minute.  It is then ready to be taken off the heat.  To complete the sauce, you can add some of the juices from the pan, the flour & butter & simmer it up until it has a slightly thicker consistency.

We served it on a moon of Jasmine rice with a small side salad with a simple honey vinegar & lemon oil dressing.  Voilà!

P.S Jasmine rice is perfectly mould-able (see 6) and this creates a posh-restaurant effect.