Dinner on New Year's Day

Do you recognize these? They are duck legs (including thighs) that I cooked for our January 01, 2025, dinner. They aren't confites (slow-cooked) but quick-cooked in our air fryer. They fit two at a time in the fryer basket. One nice thing about the air fryer is that there's no waste and very little clean up required. The duck fat that the legs release as they cook stays in bottom of the fryer basket (a drawer really) and doesn't scorch. You can save it for making biscuits, sautéing potatoes, and seasoning beans and greens. As you can see, I also air-fried two Toulouse-style pork sausages before I turned the air-fryer off.

Speaking of beans and greens, I cooked black-eyed peas and greens to go with the duck and sausages. I "sweated" some chopped garlic, celery, and shallot in a wok before putting in the beans, some bean liquid, and a couple of bay leaves along with the beans, which (chef's secret) came out of a can imported from Portugal. I haven't been able to find fresh or dried black-eyes for a while, but the canned ones are good. I also flavored some greens — in this case they were cooked curly endive (salade frisée) but I could have used kale or spinach — with the mixture of duck fat and aromatic vegetables.