If you want to enjoy a great roasted duck, you either call a Chinese restaurant and order a whole Peking duck for take-out, or you roast one yourself at home. The trick to a superb Christmas duck is to put it in the cold oven, an old, famous Danish recipe, which originally did not include alcohol. We enjoyed our Austrian duck roasted like this every year, and to this day, I have not changed a thing.
According to my Grandma, the best chicken noodle soup starts with sharpening the ax and getting the old woodblock ready. Then you pick out a chicken and after you catch it, you talk to it nicely, you pet it one last time and you say THANK YOU, after all, it has given you plenty of eggs throughout the years and now it will continue to give you one last meal. You cover the chicken with your old cardigan and carry it to the old barn, where the axe and the woodblock are waiting.
Every year during the Holiday season we get fruitcakes from our neighbors. We smile politely and hand out a tin box of cookies in exchange -always thinking they got the better deal. The fruitcakes end up in our fridge. It’s like during a rainy summer when you end up with too many zucchinis in your garden -all football size and bigger- and you try to come up with a solution to get rid of them.
The French kitchen is famous all over the world. There is no magic involved, just good ingredients and great cooking techniques, sometimes even rather simple tricks.