Roast Duck with Plum Ginger Sauce

The July category for the 2019 Food in Jars challenge was to preserve something with stonefruit.

Now, ya’ll know I do a lot of food preservation – but canning with stonefruit isn’t one of my favorites.  I have canned peaches several times, and not only are they kind of a bugger to peel, we just don’t really use them.  We much prefer freezing them to use in smoothies and milkshakes. (Note: You can buy any of the Food in Jars cookbooks over on Amazon.)

Also, I had already made piles of jam in May and June, so MORE jam wasn’t really needed. Though there are lots of great ways to use the jam in your kitchen, I just wanted to do something else for July.

I snagged some awesome plums from our local Aldi, and that was that! My kitchen scale came in handy to check the weight of the plums – good news for my husband, there were some extras that I didn’t need per the recipe, so he got to eat them plain.

Plum Ginger Sauce

I hadn’t ever canned anything with plums, and plum sauce is one thing I usually buy from other trusted canners and we enjoy it on wild duck and goose in the fall and winter.  So, I decided I would make my own this year, and chose to make Plum Ginger Sauce.

(Sidenote: having an immersion blender is SO amazing for a variety of sauces and things! Check out these before and afters – plum slices to smooth sauce, bam!)

I didn’t want to just write a simple post and tell you I made a plum sauce, which is why I am just now telling you about this in September (even though I made the sauce in July.)

The reason?  I wanted to roast a whole duck USING the plum ginger sauce so I could show you how amazing it is to cook with your preserves.

Time goes by too quickly, and summer grilling and making room in the freezer for garden harvests got in the way, so I just hadn’t gotten around to making this meal yet.  But, last week I did!

Roast Duck with Plum Sauce

I bought a whole duck from the freezer section at the grocery store. My original plan was to write up a recipe about how to roast a whole duck, but Martha Stewart already did that, so just do it her way. It was perfect. Our duck was more like 4.5 pounds, so for the last round of 50 minutes per her recipe, we only did 25 and it was done. So, 135 minutes total cook time at 425 degrees was what we did.

The only other thing we did differently than Martha was for the seasoning prior to cooking, we used black pepper and some of the lemon parsley salt I made in February. Oh, and my skin-slicing pattern isn’t as pretty, of course. It got the job done.

Having a roasting pan with a rack is very important for roasting a duck because there is SO much fat that will cook out of it. This is why there is such a hot roasting temperature, and also why you cut into the skin before roasting.

In the last 20 minutes of cooking, I basted it with plum ginger sauce. Note: don’t do that. It basically kind of burned on the duck skin.  Just wait and baste it at the very end.  We served it with extra plum ginger sauce. It tasted amazing, it just didn’t make for a beautiful photo!

 

On the side, we had fresh snow peas that I seasoned with Penzeys Bangkok Blend and sea salt.

We also made some quick fried rice, with prepared basmati rice (3 cups, cooked), 2 Tbsp of the duck fat, 1/2 diced yellow onion, 1 cup mixed vegetables, and one scrambled egg.  And a bit more of the plum ginger sauce to top the rice, of course.

Duck Pizza with Plum Sauce

After the original dinner, there was both duck and sauce left over, so a couple of nights later we made a duck, arugula, and fig pizza. Our go-to, no-fail pizza dough recipe is the Skinnytaste Bagel Dough recipe (1 recipe = 1 12-inch crust.)

We pre-bake the crust in our 12-inch cast iron pan for about 8-10 minutes at 425 degrees, then we add the toppings and bake for another 10-15 minutes.  There isn’t an exact time, because it really varies depending on what and how many toppings you use.

This pizza was initially inspired by this recipe from The Woks of Life.  For this adaptation, we diced the leftover duck meat with some dried figs and mixed it with the plum ginger sauce.  We also used goat cheese in addition to the mozzarella and arugula.

Dog Food

Wait – I almost forgot about the dogs! We always make them homemade dog food that we use as a supplement to their dry food. It is usually chicken, rice, and whatever extra vegetables we have on hand or want to use up.

Sometimes they get special treats though, like when we have duck innards that we don’t want to waste!

So, there you have it. Plum Ginger Sauce, featured in a Roast Duck Dinner and Duck Pizza! And, some Duck Dog Food.