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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.

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.