248: Crispy Duck (no)Pancakes

Here's another one following in my recent line of near successes. I'd had a whole duck in the freezer, since they were last on offer. Finally it seemed a good time to use it and I'd thought about it long enough in advance to defrost it. Given I'd got a whole duck, what I wanted was basically a whole meal consisting of what you get (when you're going a bit posh) and have the nicer set menu in the Chinese.

I'd started the day working from home. As we all know at such times focus can easily slip; especially while you're alone in a house with a whole duck to play with. However, this day, I was busy, so I was rushing by the time I grabbed a hurried lunch break to fetch the pancakes. Into the chinese supermarket I went, instantly getting myself destracted despite the rush with the frozen prawn toasts (bad) and salt & pepper spare ribs (good). And in this combination of distraction/rush I grabbed a packet of pancakes. No Sixth Sense twist at the end of this story; you can surely all now see what's coming.

Back home & in with the duck. Really easy. Amazingly easy this. I've eaten greasy duck before - but I just can't see why you'd fail. Method:

• Defrost duck
• Pre heat oven to 200
• Sit duck on a trivet (in this case an upturned circular baking tray)
• Prick skin and rub salt in
• Into oven for 2 hours

And here it is. The skin's mostly crispy (tasty!) and where it isn't is probably because I didn't rub the salt in properly.

• To serve, I'd also bought some plum sauce (yeah, I know I could've made this), spring onions (from my garden) and cucumber (in a garden vegetable exchange with one of the girls at work).

However, here went my mistake turning this one once more into a 5/10 really should do better kind of effort.

The pancakes were for making spring rolls. These were thin translucent pancakes. Being both  the wrong texture and not nearly substantial enough to hold the duck. So instead of duck pancakes it became duck-on-a-plate-with-sauce-psring-onion-and-cucumber-bits. Not very catchy is it?

Hey-ho. The duck was good. And I now have a packet of spring roll pancakes; so there's a challenge for me!