Tonight I tried to make duck teriyaki using Nigella’s recipe. I made a few adaptations to the sauce as I had to use what I already had in the cupboards so that meant mild rice vinegar instead of sake, pale cream sherry instead of mirin and 4 tsp of garlic and ginger paste instead of just 2 tsp ginger. I also fried a bit of spring onion in the groundnut oil and at the end I threw in one sliced yellow pepper and 2 handfuls of mangetout and sugar snaps. All these adaptations were fine. I failed only in the duck area. Sigh.

I had a whole duck you see. A lovely free range bird on special offer from Waitrose. Mr W kindly jointed it for me and I put the breasts back in the fridge for another meal. All the rest of the meat was to be used in the teriyaki. I thought that if I scored the legs quite deeply I wouldn’t need to bone them. Let me tell you, I was wrong. The juices next to the bone were still not running clear even though the smaller pieces of duck were way way overdone. Panicking, I fished out the smaller pieces and set them aside and scored the legs even deeper and threw them back in. I also added some water to the sauce to try to poach the legs a bit rather than just frying them. But somehow I overcooked the legs too and by the time the rice was ready I hadn’t reduced the sauce back down again after the addition of the water, well not enough anyway. So I killed all the duck and my sauce wasn’t syrupy enough either. Argh. On the upside though the sauce was quite tasty. This is what was left; I was too distraught to take photos of what we actually ate:

Moral of the story: no bones means NO BONES.