A Local Meal

So, remember this stuff? 

Well, this weekend we got to cooking, and turned it into this:

And then made this: 

And put it all together to have this for dinner. 

Plus, we picked up some peaches at the farmer's market on Saturday (also where we got the duck, cherries, and potatoes) and pulled together a peach cobbler. 

It turned out to be quite a spectacular meal! The two major highlights, for me, were the fava bean puree and the duck with cherry glaze.  The puree was inspired by a recipe in Richard Ruben's book, The Farmer's Market Cookbook.  After shelling, boiling, and de-skinning the fava beans (they may look large, but you don't get much!), we threw them in a food processor with olive oil, garlic, truffle oil, salt and pepper.  Spread on toast and topped with grated parmesan, they were utterly delectable.  It was probably a good thing the beans turned out to only be a fairly small amount, or I would have eaten hundreds of these things. 

Wright got the smoked duck at the farmer's market - he'd been eyeing it for weeks - and we topped it with a simple cherry sauce.  After pitting the cherries, we put them into a sauce pan with water, sugar, and orange zest, and let it simmer until the duck was ready.  The flavors came together perfectly, if I do say so myself. 

I won't lie, I'm not a huge fan of beets, so I thought our beet and goat cheese salad (with mint and a little vinaigrette) was unexciting.  The roasted fingerling potatoes were creamy and delicious, but the local carrots ended up lacking in flavor.  More butter, perhaps? The peach cobbler was adapted from Ina Garten's recipe for peach raspberry crisp, from her classic The Barefoot Contessa Cookbook.  There was nothing wrong with that dish, that's for sure!

Anyway, we were very proud of our local meal, based off of the veggies we got at this week's CSA.  I still have a pound of greens sitting in my fridge, so that will need to be attacked at another time...