Friday Night Take-away - Crispy Aromatic Duck

Z pointed out, quite rightly, that we had fallen off the Friday Night Take-away wagon.  It's not that we had grown tired of the tradition, simply that we had failed to think about it when planning our meals for the past few weeks.  To get things back on track I decided to roll my sleeves up and try something new, crispy aromatic duck.

There was no way that I was going to sacrifice a whole duck to this cause, there are only two of us after all, so I bought a couple of legs and started looking for a recipe.  What I found was incredible and, to be honest, labour intensive and time consuming.  I decided to throw caution to the wind and do what I normally do, make it up as I go along.

Using Ken Hom's spice rub; five spice, szechuan pepper, black pepper salt and cumin, the legs were marinated all day and that is where we went our separate ways.  I'm sure Ken is nothing but authentic, but steaming the duck legs for three hours then letting them cool completely before deep-frying them was just a little much for me.  I also found a recipe which instructed poaching the duck for hours in vegetable stock but that too seemed a bit faffy.  For simplicity's sake I decided to roast the seasoned duck legs until the meat was falling from the bones and take it from there.

The shredded duck meat was served with hoi sin sauce, spring onion, cucumber and of course Chinese pancakes.  We also had some pork and Chinese cabbage dim sum and some fried rice to soak up the Tsing Tao. 

Beer, a home made take away and an England win in the Euro's.  Do Fridays get any better than this?