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For this year’s Duck Day theme we decided on the Silk Road. This was mostly because corwin wanted to figure out a theme that would encompass both duck shawarma and tandoori duck. Since both those things are quite heavy/filling, I wanted to come up with other dishes that would be lighter. Bam, I thought of the Silk Road and we were off and running.

As it turns out there was not a single “road” but a network of trade routes that stretched from the Philippines at one extreme all the way to the Mediterranean coast at the other, with some land routes and some sea routes. So the meal could start in Thailand, slip past the Philippines, hit mainland China, trek through India, Egypt, and modern-day Turkey/Israel, with dessert coming to rest in Italy.

1. Opening Cocktail: “Long Thailand Iced Tea”
2. Amuse: Duck Arroz Caldo
3. Dumpling course: a duck soup dumpling, a duck “char siu” bun, and a duck seven-spice sausage
4. Soup course: Duck wonton soup
5. First Main: Tandoori duck with kale saag paneer fritters, garlic naan, and raita
6. Palate cleanser: Egyptian mint tea sorbet
7. Second Main: Duck shawarma with homemade pita, labneh, zhoug, and babaganoush
8. Cheese course: rose-water candied dates stuffed with bleu cheese, various cheeses, with homemade crackers, honeycomb
9. Dessert: Olive oil cake with pistachio gelato and candied citrus
10. Followed by tea/coffee and mignardises (hibiscus marshmallows, pistachio white chocolate truffles, dark chocolate truffles)

(If you’re not familiar with the Duck Day tradition, here’s the tl;dr — corwin doesn’t like turkey all that much and always wanted to make duck and his mother never would. So when he went to college in 1986 he decided to make duck for Thanksgiving and has been doing so every year since. This year we got lucky and only 14 people out of our guest list could make it–we’ve had as many as 28, which is the max we can fit into our house for a seated, plated, coursed meal, which this is. Not surprisingly, it’s SOOOOOO much easier to cook for 14 than for twice that many.)

To just see lots of photos of the meal and prep, take a look at my November 2015 Instagram feed, where I also have some small videos. To see descriptions of the dishes, recipes, and embedded photos, keep going under the cut:

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

A delicious summer pie: strawberry basil pie with balsamic vinegar!

It’s farm share season again, and so it’s time once again here in New England to grab all the best of the seasonal fruits and vegetables as they come. corwin recently called to say he was coming home with several quarts of the first strawberries of the year and so he thought I should make a pie. (It was my night to cook.) So before he got home I whipped up a batch of pie crust (I used the all-butter, food-processor variation of Flaky Pastry Dough from the 1990s edition of The Joy of Cooking and I added a bunch of fresh grated nutmeg to the dough) and then started looking at recipes.

The “problem” with plain strawberry pie is that it can actually come out too sweet and too homogenous. Some solve this by doing strawberry rhubarb, but we didn’t have rhubarb. Some suggest upping the acid content with more lemon juice, but you still have relentless strawberry, then. The nutmeg in the crust was going to help a little, as was the fact that I was going to do a lattice top, which gives the pie a little more toothsome bite, but how to add complexity and body to the flavor?

And then I realized I was staring at a small basil plant that has been growing on the kitchen counter for about two months now….

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.