So I’ve finally cooked a protein that I’ve always wanted to work with – duck! Thanks to Hungry Mouse roasting a whole duck was super easy and tasty. I did follow his suggestion and cooked up the liver with a little butter, garlic, thyme, salt and pepper and ate it on some toasty bread as a cook’s snack.

I cooked some potatoes with my roasted duck and they soaked up lots of the the delicious duck fat. To make the potatoes, I quickly boiled a pound of unpeeled baby potatoes (local & organic) in heavily salted water for about 5 minutes and then drained them and gave the potatoes a quick bashing by vigorously shaking the closed pan with the drained potatoes inside – just enough to soften them up, not break them apart. I dumped the potatoes in with the duck for its last hour of baking and then 10 minutes before the duck was supposed to done, I used the back of a wooden spoon to slightly smash each one. A touch of salt later and they were amazing – crispy edges and soft insides. I also served tangerine/cumin glazed carrots.

Now I have left over duck (not a lot, but a bit), so I had decide what I wanted to do with it. I settled on throwing together some spring rolls. This isn’t so much a recipe as it is suggestions with instructions. Play around with the vegetables and flavors you like. One of my sister’s former roommates makes really good shrimp spring rolls with peanut sauce. I had hoped to add enoki mushrooms, but couldn’t find them, so I didn’t use any mushrooms. I had some glaze from the duck leftover, so I cooked it again (to make sure it wasn’t growing anything nasty and used it as the sauce.

Roasted Duck Spring Rolls

Leftover duck (you could use leftover chicken or turkey)
1 head bibb lettuce
Rice papers
2.5 ounces cellophane noodles
1 carrot, julienned
1 small cucumber, julienned
1 small red pepper, julienned

To wrap the rolls:
Setup your workplace. You’ll want your ingredients in front of you, a pile of the dry rice papers, a bowl of warm water, and a try lined with paper towels for the finished rolls. You’ll be making these one at a time. Dip a dry rice paper wrapper into the warm water. This softens up the wrapper so you can roll it.

Lay out the softened rice paper wrapper. Spring roll wrappers have a rough side and a smooth side – the smooth side should be facing down. Lay a little of each filling towards one side of the rice paper.

I used about 1/2 ounce of duck for each spring roll and that was about right. Plan on about 1 leaf of lettuce and a few strips of every other vegetable and about 2 tablespoons of noodles. Go light on the filling for the first few until you get the hang of rolling the spring rolls. Fold the edge of the wrapper that is closest to the filling up and over the filling. Pull that edge back, tight against the filling and fold both the right and left sides of the spring roll wrapper over until the ends of the filling – the sides should meet (at least close) in the middle.

Roll the wrapper the rest of the way up as tightly as possible. Hold onto the sides until you have the first roll completed, then you can let go of the sides and continue rolling the spring roll until you reach the end of the rice paper wrapper.

Proof that even with a lot of practice you can still mess up...

Repeat with more wrappers until you have used up your filling. Serve with the sauce below or something like Thai sweet chili or peanut sauce.

Spring Roll Sauce

adapted from Hungry Mouse
1/4 cup molasses
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup fresh tangerine or orange juice
2 tbs soy sauce
1/4 tsp red chili flakes

Combine the ingredients and bring to a simmer. Cook for about 10-12 minutes until reduced enough to coat a spoon. Use to glaze a duck, or cool slightly and serve with duck spring rolls.