Thursday, February 24, 2011

Duck breast and avocado salad 鴨の胸肉とアボカドのサラダ

This is another one of making-something-from-leftover dishes. We had leftover roasted duck breast. I thought I was making a starter dish for sake but I was told that we were having red wine instead. So I had to change my menu on a dime and came up with this starter.

This is just a small salad consisting of greens (baby arugula and spinach), avocado, tomato, cucumber and sliced duck breast. The avocado was nicely ripe and made this dish. The avocado was cut into 1/2 inch cubes. I cut the cucumber in my usual snake belly fashion and then cut into half inch segments. Campari tomato was skinned, peeled and quartered. The duck breast was thinly sliced and halved. The dressing is my usual mustard, honey dressing (Dijon mustard, honey, finely chopped shallot, rice vinegar, olive oil with salt and pepper).

Again nothing special but the combination worked well. We had this with a glass of red, Maroon Winery Spring Mountain District, Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2007. Despite vinegar in the dressing (the dressing is sightly sweet from honey and rice vinegar is mild), this salad went well with this wine. After this, I made three tuna sashimi dish from frozen yellow-fin tuna including tuna and avocado cubes, tuna "zuke" sashimi, and Yamakake. We switched to a U.S. brewed Gekkeikan sake, "Black and Gold", surprisingly pleasant sake and we enjoyed both the sake and the food. Only problem was that this was Sunday evening instead of Saturday or Friday.

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