And you thought it was just chicken, beef, pork, lamb, fish, pasta, veggie, soups and sarnies? Nope, hiding at the back of the chicken section is this 15 minute version of the Chinese restaurant favourite, which I thought I would have a "quack" at tonight...
In my 15 minute cooking career so far I have cooked a few meals which are much quicker versions of traditionally slowly cooked dishes - tagines for example or curries - but this was taking it to a whole new level - a crispy duck would normally take some 5 hours to cook in the oven. So how do you cram 5 hours of cooking into 15 minutes? Well instead of roasting the duck, you fry it. And instead of using the whole duck you only use the breasts. And instead of cooking the breasts whole, you cut them into little pieces. It felt like a lot of changes, and a little sacrilegious to be cutting these juicy breasts into cubes.
I got off to a bad start when I couldn't find any iceberg lettuce in Waitrose so I used little gem instead. The cooking is straightforward, but there's a lot of chopping which is quite time consuming. The order also seems a bit wrong - why does it tell you to cook the noodles first when they take so little time and so will be left to get cold? I got it plated up and, although I think the idea is that you use the lettuce leaves as spoons, to make nice little bite sized parcels, it was a bit messier than intended and we had no option but to use knives and forks.
There were a few issues - the duck would have been nicer if the breasts had been cooked whole, but then it couldn't be described as crispy. As it was, the fat didn't really render, so it wasn't really crispy anyway. There was also a bit too much sauce. But, everything tasted nice so it's hard to fault it too much. I just think that maybe, with these ingredients, it should be possible to cook something more impressive.
Lolz gave the dish 8/10. Difficulty rating 5/10.
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