Vegetable Harvest: Poultry and Meats
September 2007 Cookbook of the Month: Vegetable Harvest by Patricia Wells
Please post your full-length reviews of poultry and meat recipes here. Please mention the name of the recipe you are reviewing as well as any modifications you made to the recipe.
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JoanN
Aug 31, 2007 10:04PM
Seared Duck Breast with Espelette Pepper Jelly, p. 111
I decided to make this after buying some duck breasts at the farmer's market - I think mine were Pekin breasts, and quite a bit smaller than the 12 oz wants she calls for (but of course since my kitchen scale is broken, I wasn't sure - mine were probably 6 oz). I did some research about cooking times for these smaller breasts, but didn't come up with much. So, I followed the directions, but only cooked them back on the skin again for 1 minute, and then let them rest while we had our curried beet soup. I didn't make the jelly but used a hot pepper jelly I'd bought, and warmed it as prescribed. I also sauteed some really pale green peppers - sliced - in some duck fat, and tossed some wild arugula with a little duck fat and white wine vinegar.
The duck was slightly overdone for our tastes, but still very moist. Next time I think I'd cut down the cooking time a little. The skin was nice and crispy though.
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Has anyone tried the seven hour leg of lamb? Im would love to try it out at my party but am not sure since I have never heard anything about it!
Thanks!
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I haven't. But seven-hour leg of lamb is a not-uncommon recipe. Molly Stevens has a recipe for it in "All About Braising." Simply because those who cooked from Stevens's book had great success with nearly every recipe and those who cooked from Vegetable Harvest did not (to put it mildly!), I'd trust the Molly Stevens version more than I would the Wells. The Wells book, I believe, was deemed to be something of a book of low-fat recipes. Don't know if that's true of the leg of lamb, but for a party I'd think you'd want a full-out, flavorful-as-it-can-be version.
Here's a link to the Stevens version. You can see how it compares with the Wells (I don't have the Wells, so don't know).
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Thank you so much!!! Im going to read some reviews on the Stevens version- I've always heard good things about her recipes like you said! :)
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Sorry, gastronomy. Only just now realized I forgot to post the link to the recipe. Here it is:
http://tinyurl.com/384ca8
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I've not tried it since my husband has banned the book, so to speak. I agree w/ JoanN's comment about the book being "low fat", though it doesn't explicitly say so.
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