Recipe File: Pan Seared Duck Breast with Ducky Hominy Grits

by Stepto
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Duck in any great quantity is bad for you.  But ever since The Fantastic Mr. Fox, combined with the Christmas dinner from A Christmas Story, I’ve been enamored with the bird in its various ways of preparation. Properly prepared, duck breast can be one of the most amazing experiences you’ve ever had with a red meat bird.  It’s like the anti-ostrich in terms of health benefits. The closest thing I can compare it to is prime steak, especially when it’s done leg confit or seared breast.

This recipe we’ll be doing pan seared breast, medium rare.

Ingredients:

4 six ounce Duck Breasts, fat and skin attached
1 tablespoon course sea salt
3 teaspoons coarsely ground black pepper
1/4 cup white onion, minced
2 tablespoons garlic, minced
1/4 cup white wine

Grits:

1 cup regular grits (not instant)
1 teaspoon sea salt
4 cups water
5 teaspoons Duck fat (Rendered from duck breasts above)

Using a serrated knife, score the fat side of the duck breasts deeply crossways.  When done there should be 2 or 3 deep cut X shapes on the fat side of the breasts.  Lightly dust the fat side in pepper and sea salt but leave at least half of each available.  Flip the breasts over and coat the other side in the remaining sea salt and pepper.

Bring the four cups water to a boil in a deep pan.  Add in slowly the one cup of grits.  Let boil/simmer for 30 minutes.

While that’s going, combine the onion, garlic and wine into a shallow frying pan.  Cook at medium heat until most of the wine has boiled off and the garlic and onion are soft.  At just the moment where the wine is still liquid in the pan and the other ingredients are soft, place the breasts in fat side down on medium heat still.  There should be immediate sizzle when the fat is placed.  Tend carefully for 6 minutes as the fat renders and shrinks.  The red side of the breast should become a deeper red and bloody, and the breasts should shrink noticeably in size.  That’s ok.  Carefully watch because as the fat renders it will deepen the oil in the pan and you have to be careful not to let it brown. While this is going on, preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

After six minutes, flip the breasts to the meat side and cook in the oil for 4 minutes.  Once done, remove the breasts and set in a roasting pan.

Take the rendered duck fat, should be roughly 5 teaspoons worth (discard the rest) and beat it slowly into the grits until they are done.

Put the duck breasts in the oven, fat side up, for six minutes.

Remove the duck breasts from the oven and slice into half inch thick slices with the fat attached.  Color should be that of medium rare steak.  Nice and juicy red in the center. Serve with a dollop of the duck fat grits on the side and a nice green salad.

Enjoy!

A Geekster’s Paradise Part 4: On Hungarian Phrase Books

by Stepto
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I couldn’t believe my luck at finding the original Wing Commander Tiger’s Claw, and the Robosport install sheet.

But sometimes, just sometimes, when you stare into the wormhole, the wormhole totally makes eye contact then talks to its friend for a sec then makes eye contact again and then you are all “crap does that mean I should talk to it or what?” then it talks to the friend again then totally gives you a full-on stare and you are all like “ok I will make my move” and you head to it, but then the wormhole completely acts like it never looked at you at all and you panic and stammer,

“There’s…uh…hey.  How…I mean…uh…can you…isn’t it…uh…wow who knew Mrs. Kintzeg would be the dance chaperone.”

Then you realize the wormhole’s friend is totally giving you the adoring eyes hey, wow she’s hot and it’s an 80’s teen comedy and you realize you liked her all along.

Yeah, that’s when I discovered this:

IMG_0158

Now, you have to remember, I’m old.  I’m like, really old.  My age from first digit added with the second equals 10.  FOR ONLY THE THIRD TIME IN MY LIFE. And despite my deep, deep steeping in where this book came from, I totally was all “wtf is this” and opened it and realized I liked her all along:

IMG_0159

Monty Python’s Flying Circus for the PC was an outstanding bridge from a comedy troupe to a PC game.  Back then, the bar for achieving such a crossover that worked was lower, because the amount of people you had to spend in resources to create An Incredible Game Experience (TM) was lower than the amount of people you had to dedicate to Make Something The Fans Will Love (TM).  Today, it’s pretty much the inverse.  If I wanted to create Big Bang Theory: The Game, I would have to spend so much money on the game part that the humor of the original source would get diluted.

In this case, the game chose to specialize on a particular facet of the Monty Python universe: Terry Gilliam’s animation. This was a platformer set entirely in the world of the show’s animation. Even the copy protection was integrated into the show, as you had to choose between types of cheese from the phrase book.

You ended up controlling D.P. Gumby through levels containing all manner of Pythonesque obstacles (Think parrots. Vikings. One (or more) Spanish Inquisitions, and thank god, Spam) all in the Gilliam style, which translated surprisingly well to the 256 palette of MS-DOS based VGA games.

The best part was at the end of each level you threw up what you collected into a huge pit (note, those words have never been typed together.) If you did ok you got a part of your mind in reward.  And in bonus rounds (featuring the ministry of pointless arguments) you could lower your score significantly.

Oh, did I mention that in this game, the lower your score, the better?  You start out at 1 billion points and count down.

When I opened that phrase book and was stupidly going “what is this?” I both failed and scored in geekdom.

Then Lady in Red started playing, I saw it for what it was, and we slow danced. And I totally rocked the “take her arm part” at the opening with the “ask her to dance” part.

A Geekster’s Paradise Part 4: On Hungarian Phrase Books

by Stepto
No Comments

I couldn’t believe my luck at finding the original Wing Commander Tiger’s Claw, and the Robosport install sheet.

But sometimes, just sometimes, when you stare into the wormhole, the wormhole totally makes eye contact then talks to its friend for a sec then makes eye contact again and then you are all “crap does that mean I should talk to it or what?” then it talks to the friend again then totally gives you a full-on stare and you are all like “ok I will make my move” and you head to it, but then the wormhole completely acts like it never looked at you at all and you panic and stammer,

“There’s…uh…hey.  How…I mean…uh…can you…isn’t it…uh…wow who knew Mrs. Kintzeg would be the dance chaperone.”

Then you realize the wormhole’s friend is totally giving you the adoring eyes hey, wow she’s hot and it’s an 80’s teen comedy and you realize you liked her all along.

Yeah, that’s when I discovered this:

IMG_0158

Now, you have to remember, I’m old.  I’m like, really old.  My age from first digit added with the second equals 10.  FOR ONLY THE THIRD TIME IN MY LIFE. And despite my deep, deep steeping in where this book came from, I totally was all “wtf is this” and opened it and realized I liked her all along:

IMG_0159

Monty Python’s Flying Circus for the PC was an outstanding bridge from a comedy troupe to a PC game.  Back then, the bar for achieving such a crossover that worked was lower, because the amount of people you had to spend in resources to create An Incredible Game Experience (TM) was lower than the amount of people you had to dedicate to Make Something The Fans Will Love (TM).  Today, it’s pretty much the inverse.  If I wanted to create Big Bang Theory: The Game, I would have to spend so much money on the game part that the humor of the original source would get diluted.

In this case, the game chose to specialize on a particular facet of the Monty Python universe: Terry Gilliam’s animation. This was a platformer set entirely in the world of the show’s animation. Even the copy protection was integrated into the show, as you had to choose between types of cheese from the phrase book.

You ended up controlling D.P. Gumby through levels containing all manner of Pythonesque obstacles (Think parrots. Vikings. One (or more) Spanish Inquisitions, and thank god, Spam) all in the Gilliam style, which translated surprisingly well to the 256 palette of MS-DOS based VGA games.

The best part was at the end of each level you threw up what you collected into a huge pit (note, those words have never been typed together.) If you did ok you got a part of your mind in reward.  And in bonus rounds (featuring the ministry of pointless arguments) you could lower your score significantly.

Oh, did I mention that in this game, the lower your score, the better?  You start out at 1 billion points and count down.

When I opened that phrase book and was stupidly going “what is this?” I both failed and scored in geekdom.

Then Lady in Red started playing, I saw it for what it was, and we slow danced. And I totally rocked the “take her arm part” at the opening with the “ask her to dance” part.

A Geekster’s Paradise Part 3

by Stepto
No Comments

Underneath the Tiger’s Claw in the Box was this:

photo

Early 16-bit Windows gaming was a leap forward in what you had to do to get it to run, but also a big step backward in terms of graphical quality. Windows 3.1 abstracted a lot of what hardware could do through virtual device drivers.  This had a benefit in multiple programs could use the hardware at the same time, as opposed to MS-DOS based programs which had to run one at a time due to their exclusive hardware access.

So because MS-DOS got direct access to things like the Video card, you could have high performance, great looking games.  But Windows was often relegated to whatever your Video driver color depth ran at (usually 16, sometimes 256 colors) and a much lower performance capability. An analogy to all of this technobabble is that a minivan is optimized to get a group of people somewhere, while a Ducati is optimized to getting one person there, awesomely.

This meant the vast majority of 16-bit Windows games were turn based strategy games, and one of my favorites was Robosport. 

When I brought up my treasure trove of game manuals to E and Major Nelson and got to Robotsport, E actually squeed when I mentioned it.

“I remember that!” He said, “you had to pick the right robots and program them to beat each level. “

This is what made the game endless hours of fun.  Graphically it was very simple, but the play mechanics had tons of combinations.  You basically had 5 types of robots, and you program them to take actions within the isometric view of the “arena” to take out the enemy robots. At the beginning of each turn you survey the overall layout of the arena.  Things we take for granted in turn based play or real time strategy games today were available in Robosport by programming your robots.  You would program their path, stance, guard, shoot, attack, rescue, etc. 

It was also the first game I’m aware of for Windows that had cross platform Multiplay.  You could play over a modem with friends running Robosport on MacOS or Amiga.

I spent many hours playing Robosport, naming my robot teams (I always used names and themes from Silent Running, and delighted in using the quote “Poor Louie god bless him; he’s not with us anymore” when the bot named Louie got killed.)

One last note about this particular manual.  Go back and look at the picture of it.  Notice the first line of the Installation section: “Please make backup copies of your Robosport disks.  Really.  You want to do this.”  Ahhh those were the days.

A Geekster’s Paradise Part 2: The Wheatoning

by Stepto
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I will shortly continue my exploration of classic early 1990’s game manuals…shortly. But in the words of Stephen Hawking: You folks gotta’ getcha’ summa’ ‘dis right here*.

So, I’d been waiting for tonight for a while. This evening the LA Kings were battling the Dallas Stars at the same time that Wil Wheaton’s episode of Big Bang Theory was airing on CBS while he was stuck at w00tstock and wow if this sentence was any longer we could market it as a penis extender.

I had prepared Rochto for the battle royale that was going to be the hockey match tweeting, because Wil and I had created a fun sort of back and forth on Twitter for our various teams.

But in the mean time, three things happened. I got caught in a vortex of work banning miscreants, and Wil got caught up in a vortex of how awesome it must be to get to hang out with Adam Savage and Paul and Storm and also be on TV at the same time. And lastly, The Dallas Stars got pummeled, nay *batted about* by the LA Kings.

That’s not to say that I am (I’m not) as most Firefly fans would put it, BITTER. Because in this life we all have our moments which are wonderful. Mine tends to happen every day when I protect the Xbox LIVE service from what I affectionately call "poopheads."  I am indeed, fortunate in my work.

But to get back to the point, during tonight’s episode of Big Bang Theory (a show that I delight in holding close to my geek vest) I was forced to share my treasure with Rochto, an avowed Wil Wheaton fan.

"This is silly" was her judgment.

"Wait," I said, knowing more than I should about the show, "you don’t understand. When the guy starts making fun of his opponent in a card based game like that using Wrath of Khan quotes, that guy is totally me"

Her stare was cold, her words, cutting:

"Yeah I got that.  He kinda made me think that when he said the card game was ‘Kha-an.’"

Not only did Wil Wheaton’s LA Kings destroy my Stars this evening, Big Bang Theory’s…theories…caused my wife to slice my geek heart to the very…bone?

The crushing moment was when I realized, my grandmother still alive is my Meemaw, however there’s no tea party like Wil’s nana’s tea party. **

Wheaton had won.  Geek Wise, Hockey Wise, everything wise. So I made sure I paid special attention to his gamertag.  Oh sure he says "Don’t be a dick", but does he practice, what he preaches?***

*In fairness I only ever heard Hawking say that one time.

** No, really, you gotta see the episode to get that.

*** yeah he does.  Damn it.