Ducks strolling past my lunch table at Vergenoegd Wine Estate, 27 December 2013
Duck l'Orange is a favoured dish at Chez Pillay which is generally reserved for those rare occasions when Dr B and I have the house to ourselves. So, there's usually a pack or two of duck breasts in our freezer.
One such rare occasion manifested itself last weekend, and so we popped by our favourite vegetable store to pick up oranges. Unfortunately, said store only had 10kg pockets for R60 which is overkill for a dish requiring only four fruit. (I'm not averse to spending the money, but I have a pathological aversion to wasting food, and those oranges would have been wasted.)
Plums, however, were in ready supply at R13 a punnet. "Let's pass on the oranges," I said. "Let's do plum sauce instead."
I've made plum sauce often in the past to accompany Peking Duck and can pretty much recreate it from memory, but these days, even when cooking something familiar, I take a quick look at other people's recipes to see whether there's a new technique I haven't tried.
One such recipe which I found on YouTube had such a variation:
"To add a little bit more oomph and some extra concentrated flavor, I'm actually going to use some prunes.
"Now prunes are simply dried plums, but that dried fruit concentration adds a really nice flavor here, and it what helps to thicken the sauce as well, which is really good."
Wait, what?
I've gotten through 60 years of my life and never knew prunes were just dried plums?
Of course it makes perfect sense: prunes are to plums as raisins are to grapes, but I had never made that connection in my head my whole life through.
I feel like a complete idiot at times…
