Duck Day photos from guests, including the missing soup

Since I often forget to take pictures as we go along (though my iPhone and Twitter have made that less of a problem than it used to be) I asked guests at the meal to take pictures, too! Here are some, including a course I managed not to get any photos of prep or service, the “Hot and Sour Soup.”

The concept in this dish was to feature the vinegar, since it was the Vinegar course. (Vinegar being one of the Seven Essentials, see original post for explanation on that.)

I didn’t want a traditional, slimy “hot and sour” soup. I wanted to highlight vinegar as a desirable flavor of its own. And duck, of course. My thought was to make it more like a consomme, with duck broth (we make a ton of duck stock for this meal), just a touch of “hot”.

We bought a few vinegars to try in the soup, including a palm sugar vinegar, Chinese “chinkiang” vinegar, and we have a ton of rice wine, white, sherry, balsamic, etc… stocked here to begin with.

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Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.