Confit de canard, and some photos for a Saturday

Here are some more of my photos from last Tuesday's morning walk around the vineyard. It was a beautiful day and weirdly warm. It's warm again this morning — about 8ºC — near 50ºF. That's at 6:30 a.m. The weather forecasts I saw yesterday said we should expect unseasonably mild weather right up until Christmas.

Vines in the Renaudière vineyard outside Saint-Aignan

Speaking of the holidays, I went shopping at SuperU yesterday. It's our biggest local supermarket. The store was a madhouse. People were crowded into the meat department, especially. It was hard to maneuver your shopping cart up and down the aisles in general. The Christmas rush is on.

A walnut tree out on the gravel road through the vines

I went looking around in the meat department too. What I found was two packages of duck leg/thigh pieces — six of them in all. I'm going to make confit de canard, which is duck pieces first salted and seasoned and then slow-cooked in duck fat. I'll take some photos and blog about it.

Vines espaliered on the stone wall of a storage shed in the vineyard

I want to make the duck confit now because it gets better if it "cures" for a few days or weeks in the duck fat you cook it in. Because it's sealed in fat and protected from the air, it just needs to be stored for that amount of time in a fairly chilly place like our cold pantry downstairs. The duck confit will be part of our New Year's Day dinner.