As odd as it may seem, the hotel I work for has a CIA graduate chef who creates wonderful breakfasts that are outside of what most people would consider breakfast. Homemade biscuits with warm burrata and a sausage ragu, sunny side egg on top. Pumpkin grits with heirloom mushrooms and a poached egg. One dish has a panko crusted poached egg, deep fried! Right now the winter menu has several delicious breakfasts, one of which is a confit duck hash. It is served with three sauce blops on the plate and an egg. It kicks ass. When was the last time you had duck for breakfast? Been a while, I suppose.
But with those duck legs come duck bones, and I brought some home the other day to make stock. Dark, deep, delicious duck stock. What does one do with duck stock? Anything that you would do with chicken stock, only better. Last night I made a simple mushroom risotto with that stock and I must tell you, it was wonderful. I wish there had been leftovers, but alas, no. But there is still duck stock remaining, so I will add that to a stew I am planning on making tomorrow and it will add depth and taste and heft to the stew. I will report back.
As many of you are aware, I am in a totally bored funk state right now. The job is stupid, silly, easy and frustrating but mostly friggin boring. It uses no part of my brain except the small, tiny part that has to be nice all the time. GRRRR. I was expressing this GRRR-ness to a friend yesterday and she suggested I start looking at craigslist for goofy things to occupy some of my free time. For example, there might be an ad from someone who needs help herding cats, I could help out there for an hour or two one afternoon. Today I read some CL ads and here is one from the Russian River area (of course) that made me laugh out loud. This is the gist: would love to find people with whom to practice and learn static trapeze, acro-yoga, acro-balance and/or contact dance. I am a physical person and love using my body to do cool things. (Oh, my TMI) Working with other people is motivating and way more fun than solo (well, that's true of a lot of things!) and all of these things are best with a buddy (or two or three!). (Menage a trois?)I have a static trapeze, a double, but will need to put it up somewhere. I hope to be able to do this in the woods where I will be living.
Is there a local circus scene?
Seriously, except for my comments, that's the ad. A circus scene? The entire north bay is a circus scene, just go to Napa or Healdsburg some Saturday afternoon and watch it! And what is acro-yoga and acro-balance? Yes, I could google those words but it's much more clever to create a description in your head. Acro-yoga is like agro-yoga, in other words, yoga with animals. I am sure that's it. And the woman who posted the ad (she identified herself as a woman in her 30's) is going to live in the woods? Where? In a tent that she will fashion out of branches and leaves? And a static trapeze? Yes, again, I could google it, but those two words, static and trapeze, don't seem to go together. Aren't trapezes (trapezi?) by their nature non-static? Is a static trapeze like a chair hung from a tree that you hang off of but it doesn't move, or is it a regular trapeze with static electricity that shocks you every time you try and transfer to another swinging chair? The possibilities are confounding. (OK, I took the time out and googled it. It still doesn't make sense in that it isn't static. But whatever.)
So, in that one CL posting my small, cynical, ludicrous mind was jiggled enough to get me out of the boredom cycle for a few minutes. That's good enough for me for now!
So that's the craziness, the boredom and the duck stock. That's how it wraps up for tonight. I have on my little english muffin Roku the last episode of Downton Abbey that I will watch......with Shirley McLaine sparring with Maggie Smith and a little Paul Giamatti tossed in for fun, or so I am lead to believe by the previews. That will cure boredom for an hour. Well, that and a static trapeze with monkeys munching on confit duck legs while building a hut out of pine needles and making a fire on which to cook monkey duck risotto.
.yumm.
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