Meat Fest '08: Part 3 - Duck and Fig Pizza

Sunday morning, we awoke to another beautiful day in the Slope and headed back over to Union Market. Huevos rancheros and bellinis were on the menu for brunch but Paul, MB and I hadn't come to any conclusion as to what we should do for dinner. We knew we were going to use the duck, we just weren't sure how we should prepare it.

The bellinis didn't work out quite the way we intended. I guess I should say we didn't end up making bellinis at all. There were a few extra grill-roasted peaches from the night before and I was hoping to puree them and add a little champagne to the mix but no dice; the liquor store was closed. Instead, I ended up pureeing the peaches with a mix of rums - Goslings Dark and Captain Morgan's Spiced - and peach juice and then topped it off with Sprite. The end result? A foamy, sweet brunch cocktail with just a hint of the roasted flavor from the night before. As for the huevos rancheros, we did them on the grill, the same way we did them back in June.

Any ideas for a good name for this rum/peach concoction?

Chefs Mary and Paul

As for dinner, we came up with something on the fly. And by "something" I mean the most decadent meal of all time. It all started as we were tossing ideas around about how to use the duck when we passed Pizza Plus, the joint where we grab dough for our grill pizzas. I half-jokingly said, "What about duck pizza?" and the next thing I knew, we were listing off ingredients that would work with the duck. In the end, we decided on a mix of dates, figs, pecans, black truffles and chevre.

Earlier in the afternoon, I marinated the duck breast in some Stonewall Kitchen Fig & Vidalia Onion Sauce. Once the duck was on the grill, I cut the dates, figs and black truffles while Paul smashed the pecans and MB separated the chevre into small chunks. When the duck was a nice medium rare, I pulled it off the grill, sliced it into bite-sized pieces and tossed it with the date/fig/truffle/pecan mixture and a little black truffle oil. This mix went on top of the dough which I'd coated with more of the Fig & Vidalia Onion sauce. As you can imagine, the meal was extremely rich...but that didn't stop us from having 3 pieces each. We paired the pizza with some Blue Point Summer Ale; weird that the first time I sampled their summer brew was on the last day of summer.

Yum