Duck Curry

K loves papayas

From the very beginning of our arrival on the farm, there has been talk of harvesting the big male duck, the only duck in the chicken coop until a former feathered friend flew back home after having been sold to another farm a year or so back. Each week it seems the idea of harvesting the duck has come up, but until last week, no definitive plans had been made. Then for no particular reason, we all agreed it was time. In order to stick with the plan, we based the upcoming potluck theme around the duck to ensure the harvest would happen. Since he is a free-range duck and a little older than typical harvest age, we decided that duck curry would be a wiser option than another roast duck, which we are told was a big disappointment the last time since the meat just wasn’t as fatty or plentiful as ducks professionally raised as meat birds.

Come harvest day, my role was to hang out with little K whom we all agreed was not quite old enough to benefit from being either witness or participant. She is a tough cookie and could likely have handled it, but I’m not sure she’s at the point where we could have had a productive conversation about what was happening and why. There’s always next time, K. We had plenty of fun doing our own harvesting as we searched the farm for a ripe papaya to eat, saving the seeds to plant later on. Anyway, since I saw nothing of the harvest save for the meat brining in salt water in our fridge, I left it to Dylan to fill you in on the experience. Here is what he had to say:

Sasha and her little duckling hunting for bugs to munch

This time of year in Hawaii the clouds tend to roll down the volcano in the afternoon. You can look up the hill and see rain somewhere else, and the threat is there all day. Most of the time it is a welcome relief that never comes to fruition. It almost always breaks for sunset. Yesterday it was raining lightly when I went to go feed the chickens. Sasha (the lady duck) and her new duckling were standing in the rain, under the basketball hoop. They say that baby ducks don’t do well to get wet, but they didn’t seem to mind.

           

When the chickens see me coming they parade down the fence to greet me. I take my time scooping out some feed, shaking it around in the pan to taunt them. Sometimes the girls try to hop the fence and are quickly reminded that they are terrible aviators. Opening the gate, I throw some feed in the coop and they all file in to be locked away for the night. The male duck stays outside, quacking at me the whole time until I give him some food. Yesterday he thanked me by taking a wet shit right next to my foot. I told him to enjoy his last meal.

 

Farewell Therapist, thank you for providing us dinner.

They call the male duck Therapist. If you are not a fan of clever wordplay or the mating habits of ducks, take some time on Wiki to familiarize yourself. Suffice it say, consensual is not part of the duck vocabulary. He is a terror, or as much as he can be with his short legs and lack of arms. Since I have been feeding him the last few months, I felt that I had been complicit in his rampant duckery. I owed it to these girls to end it.

We set up a ladder in front of the garage with some cardboard underneath it. Some twine is hung down from the top and the tree stump that we use to crack coconuts was placed in front. The whole thing resembled some kind of altar. We sharpened the machete and headed over to the pen. Ducks are smarter than they look, and therapist seemed to know that we had ulterior motives. He was skittish and hard to catch, but a shot from the pellet gun right behind the eye alleviated this problem. We carried him, still a bit alive, to the garage and the duck guillotine. While the blood drained into a bucket, we brought out a large pot of boiling water. Dip the bird in for 30 seconds, then tie him up by his feet and pull all the feathers out. They come out easily. After that I made a cut around his backside into which I could insert my hand. I worked blindly around the cavity to separate the warm organs from the bones, and pulled the whole thing out in one handful. Liver and heart are saved; everything else goes in the compost with the feathers. Rinse off the blood and you got yourself a meal.

Dylan's Duck Curry in homemade Red Thai Chili sauce, so tasty and farm fresh

I must admit that I was hesitant about the whole process, but not because of the murder part. My disdain for Therapist was real and I have no moral objection to being omnivorous. I was afraid that if the whole process made me squeamish I would have to stop eating meat. Hypocrisy is the worst of human faults for me, and if I could not do myself what others often do for me I would have to stop eating meat. I like meat.

No worries! I’ll have to work my way up to bigger animals, but any guilt I may have had about harvesting Therapist faded fast. I used every little part of that duck, with only the head going to waste. When you are wrist deep in a still warm duck, the moral implications of eating meat get pushed aside. We need people who are willing to slaughter, and really I think everyone should do it at least once in their lives.

Sweet mango sticky rice for dessert, another dish to add to my favorite list.

...So I bet you are wondering how the duck tasted, huh? I must admit that seeing the body of a duck we fed every day brining in the refrigerator was a bit off-putting and at first I was unsure I would be able to take part in his consumption. Having been a vegetarian for 16 years I wasn’t surprised at how contemplative I was about eating duck for dinner when the potluck finally arrived. I didn’t expect it to be an easy decision. Thankfully, Dylan was in charge of preparing the duck and he understood how I was feeling and agreed to chop the duck rather than roast it whole, which is how we ended up with the red Thai curry that set the theme for our dinner. Though our potlucks are always fantastic, this one came together so beautifully. Everyone’s dish was inspired by our curry and we ended up with green papaya salad to start and ginger chicken to snack on, with mango sticky rice for dessert. Once we had all filled our plates, we had a brief moment of thanks to Therapist for feeding us, and we all dug in. Each dish complemented the others and I am happy to say that the curry was a huge hit and the perfect way to celebrate the harvest. We ended the evening with fully bellies and happy hearts, thankful for the beautiful feast that crazy duck provided for us. His was not a wasted or unappreciated life, and now that duck lives on in his tiny offspring whom we all welcome to life here on the farm.

A Bountiful Harvest

Last week Dylan spent an entire morning pruning the two tomato plants in the main garden. They were huge; an avalanche of leaves exploding out of the cages, but hardly any tomatoes. At least, before Dylan pruned the plants, that's what we thought. For as big as they were, we had only gotten maybe one ripe tomato out of the two plants and only saw a few more green ones. With a pair of garden shears, Dylan uncovered a wealth of green tomatoes that had been hiding beneath the leaves, just desperate for some vitamin D therapy. Within a few short days, I pulled out a handful of luscious red fruit, with plenty more left on the vine. I couldn’t resist popping one in my mouth, I’ve never had much will power when it comes to these things. I used to eat a pint of grape tomatoes each week as a snack or mixed in with my kale and eggs for breakfast back in Seattle. I love tomatoes. Just as I had hoped, these crimson beauties came about as close as anything to the Mountain Magic tomatoes Dylan and I gorged ourselves on every weekend they were in season at the Ballard Sunday Market. We just couldn’t help ourselves and for 6-8 weeks we spent the majority of our market cash on tomatoes. 

In addition to fresh sweet tomatoes, we also have suddenly found ourselves with an abundance of eggplant. We have the long, skinny Japanese eggplants as well as the dark, fat Black Beauties. I have been monitoring the eggplants' growth with little K, checking in on them every morning to see how much they’ve grown. Since she’s had family in town and I’ve been doing projects all week, it had been a few days since I last looked in on them. When I went out to see about the tomatoes, I peeked over at the eggplant bed and found armfuls of eggplants, many of them ripe and begging to be harvested. The plants themselves are so heavy under the weight of their plump purple fruit that many of the eggplants sagged all the way to the ground, vulnerable and in need of rescue. I snipped off the ripe ones to distribute between the farm families and propped up the plants so the bugs wouldn’t get into the littler ones that still needed a few more days on the vine.

Naturally, I am insisting that we make good use of these wonderful new ingredients and make eggplant parm, one of my favorite dishes. We have everything we need to make it, even the cheese thanks to Margaret, Dylan’s mom, who sent us some recently. Eggplant parm is one of my most favorite foods and has been ever since Dylan made it for back when we first moved in together in 2008. Before that eye-opening culinary experience I thought eggplants that had been fried, soaked in tomato sauce and covered in parmesan cheese were designed to be served atop a bed of spaghetti, as they did at the Olive Garden. Back when I was a vegetarian, that was about the only dish I ever ate there and I was a frequent customer before I met Dylan and was introduced to a new level of quality eating. I could not have been more wrong about eggplant parm. By skipping the pasta and pressing the sliced eggplants for hours before frying them, they stood on their own as a casserole dish loaded with flavor and just the right amount of crispness to keep them from being mushy. I will never eat eggplant parm another way now. Who needs the pasta when the eggplants steal the show?

Luckily eggplants and tomatoes are quite the complementary pair, so we are in no shortage of ideas for what to do with our garden bounty this week. Dylan plans to make what is sure to be a delectable batch of vegetable antipasti, plenty of tomato sauce, an excess of baba ganoush, and as per my request, some eggplant fritters, my latest farm food obsession. I blame Dylan for getting me hooked on fritters, he should have known I would fall for them. It all started this week with our potluck theme of soups, stews, and comfort foods. Chicken soup and potatoes au gratin had already been claimed and so we settled on skillet pizzas having been inspired with last week’s successful sandwich wraps. We figured why not try out a skillet pizza? So Dylan prepped the dough and eventually spun out seven 8-inch, thin crust skillet pizzas. We got all our toppings from the garden and I seized the opportunity to make my favorite, eggplant parm pizza with the long slender Japanese eggplant I had picked earlier in the week that needed to be used. Reluctantly, Dylan agreed. He knew it would make for a delicious and interesting pizza after all and the skinnier eggplants are far less annoying to prepare and fry.

I haven’t had a whole lot of this skinny bright purple eggplant, it’s not the right size for eggplant parm, but I’d had it in some of the veggie dishes at our favorite restaurants in Seattle’s International District, where our first apartment in the city was. There was this one place, Shanghai Garden right across from the Asian grocery store, Uwajimaya, where we always used to get takeout from. One of our favorite dishes was garlic roasted Japanese eggplant, a Szechuan style dish that makes my mouth water just thinking about it. Before arriving in Hawaii, this is the only time I can remember eating this style of eggplant but it has quickly made it onto my list of favorites now. I guess that’s a good thing considering how many of them we are going to be eating over the next few weeks.

Back to our pizza-making endeavor, these long purple plants were the perfect size for our skillet pizzas, coming off the frying pan soft yet crispy and about the size of pepperoni slices. I would happily never buy a bag of potato chips or eat a french fry again if I could have these little treats whenever I wanted them. They were so good one their own I could barely restrain myself from eating them all before Dylan had the chance to get them onto the pizzas. I think I am going to have to learn to make these little fritters myself because there is no way I am going to convince Dylan to make them as often as I want to eat them. Despite how good he is at making eggplant parm, it’s one of his least favorite dishes to prepare. Something about being too time-consuming and a pain in the ass...whatever, I stop listening at no and get lost wallowing in my own misery because I know I won’t be eating any anytime soon. It’s high time I learn how to do this one myself. They are by no means difficult to make, I’ve watched Dylan fry eggplants plenty of times, it’s just easier (and faster) to let Dylan do it. In fact, I think I am going to make a batch of them tonight. I’ll let you know how they turn out.

PS. Isn't this watermelon radish the most beautiful vegetable you have ever seen? I'm in love, yet again...