Friends reunited…

One of my regular commenters is my old friend Gabby, an ex-Brightonian who now lives with her husband in Hokkaido, in northern Japan. (Okay, officially she’s my little sister’s old friend, but I’ve managed to elbow in on her too.)

She’s most definitely a fellow lover of good food, and my posts often torment her with reminders of dishes from back home. So, when she told me she was coming over to England for a couple of weeks, I had to get her round for dinner.

In the end, I actually decided to cook not a British meal, but a dish I discovered in Claudia Roden’s A New Book Of Middle Eastern Food, which has become a real favourite of mine – duck with pomegranate and walnut sauce.

I’d bought a bottle of pomegranate molasses in Istanbul last year, and found this recipe when I was trawling through all my cookbooks to find out how to use it. I’ve made it a number of time with chicken, but this is the first time with duck.

The meat is cooked long and slow, and the resulting sauce is rich, gamey and sweet. It deserves to be well savoured, so on the side I made a couple of simple dishes – a delicate saffron rice, and slow-cooked courgettes with garlic and parsley, which is from a recipe by Skye Gyngell of Petersham Nurseries.

Although it wasn’t British, the flavours of the meal were still a long way from what Gabby generally eats in Japan, which is what she likes when she comes over here. Judging by the empty plates, I think she enjoyed her short trip to the Middle East via south London!

Hello ducky!

As someone who really loves food (what, didn’t you realise?), most of the time I refuse to compromise what I eat just because I’m cooking for one. So, it was with a certain amount of glee that I read an article in last Sunday’s Observer Food Monthly magazine about what famous foodies eat when they’re alone. It was reassuring to see that I’m not the only one to spend an inordinate amount of time preparing, cooking and eating good food on my own.

A perfect example of the pleasure I take in cooking and eating on my own is the neat little wild duck I bought at Shellseekers in Borough Market, last Saturday. Being wild, it was quite small compared to the farmed ducks you generally find, and I had every intention of scoffing the lot myself.

However, it wasn’t to be. My friend Lene unexpectedly invited herself over for dinner on Monday night, so I decided to be a good friend and share my duck with her!

As I was at home on Sunday, I thought I’d get ahead of the game and cook the duck then, so all I would have to do on Monday evening, when I got home from work, was reheat the dish. So, once again, I turned to my bulging folder of cut-out recipes, and found this Nigel Slater one for slow-cooked duck with ginger and star anise.

Inevitably, there were a couple of ingredients I didn’t have – the rice wine and the palm sugar. So I replaced them with rice wine vinegar and honey. Plus, instead of cutting the duck into pieces before going into the pot, because it was so small, I just cooked it whole and carved it up once cooked.

This is the first time I’ve knowingly eaten wild duck, and it really did taste wonderful – full-flavoured, succulent and, crucially, not too fatty. Just watch out for the lead shot!