Happy Lunar New Year!

Ever since I saw Eat Drink Man Woman when I was fourteen, I've been captivated by the idea of inflating a duck to produce a crispy skin Peking duck, which made Chinese banquets with noisy relatives that stretched too far into the night, long after all the food had been eaten, a little more bearable. With food, it's hard to separate the memories from the taste, and sometimes I wonder if the reason I love duck so much is because it reminds me of time spent with my Dad: always ordering duck if it was on the menu in a French restaurant, eating duck noodles at our neighborhood Chinese restaurant, picking out roast duck at the Chinese butcher shop on Broadway St. in San Francisco. My dad would choose the duck with the fewest creases, reasoning that it was the least fatty. I'm not sure of the reasoning, but any duck he chose would have juicy breast meat with a hardly a trace of fat between it and the skin, which I discovered later, on my own, is not always the case.

The theory behind inflating the duck is to separate the skin from the duck so that when it roasts, the fat is rendered completely, leaving behind only a crisp skin. For our Chinese New Year feast this year, I was determined to make my own Peking duck. It doesn't really make sense to, cost wise, especially when Nam Fong in Chinatown sells a delicious roast duck for $16, but sometimes, curiosity consumes us. I bought my duck, cleaned it, and then inserted one end of our bike pump under the flap of skin by the neck, and started pumping, waiting for all my childhood fantasies of cooking duck come true. It didn't work...I guess you could say I was deflated... How does one get a tight seal with duck skin?! So much for childhood dreams. So instead, I just separated the skin from the duck with my hands, getting all up in that duck's business, wearing the duck like a glove. After boiling the duck for a few minutes to tighten the skin and marinating it in a solution of shoyu, five spice, honey, shaoxing wine, and Chinese black vinegar, I hung it up next to a fan to dry for 8 hours, all in the hopes of achieving that perfect, crisp skin. I'm not sure if it's the humidity and heat, but the duck never really dried out.

And in the end? It wasn't that great...not enough flavor, and definitely no crisp skin. A disappointment, yes, but still an adventure that I'll remember as I head into Nam Fong.

The other dishes, thankfully, were less of a failure: Chinese style steamed whole opakapaka, caught by a friend, char siu chow mein, Hunan braised tofu, garlic eggplant, stir-fried Kauai shrimp with XO sauce, and lettuce wraps with turkey (instead of squab because it was ridiculously cheap...what better way to celebrate my Chinese-ness with my cheapness?) and fresh water chestnuts. I first tasted fresh water chestnuts working in the restaurant, and even though they're a pain to peel, they're worth it. They're sweet and crisp, like an asian pear.

For dessert, homemade nian gao. The nian gao I'm used to is stiffer than what is sold in Chinatown here, and full of goodies like red bean and Chinese dates. It holds up to pan-frying, resulting in a crisp outside and gooey middle. And not so traditional, a Vietnamese affogato: a shot of espresso with tapioca and a scoop of condensed milk ice cream. Not used to drinking coffee anymore, it literally kept me awake the *entire* night.