Duck breast salad with grilled shiitake 鴨胸肉と焼きシイタケのポン酢酢の物

This is another quick dish I made from the leftovers we had as a starter dish of the evening. There is no recipe for this, I just concocted it on a whim. I had roasted duck breast leftover and I thought the combination of onion and ponzu with duck will be good.

The amounts are for two small servings as seen above. I fist thinly sliced red onion (1/3 medium). I salted, kneaded, and soaked it in water for 5 minutes and wrung out the moisture with a paper towel. Cucumber was sliced obliquely very thin. I salted and squeezeed out the excess moisture (one small American mini-cuke). I thinly sliced the duck breast (cooked to medium rare with nice uniform rosy color) and then cut it into wide strips (4 thin slices per serving). I also found fresh shiitake mushroom (4, small) left in our refrigerator and decided to include it in this dish. I washed and broiled them in a toaster oven (it is sort of steam broiled). After a few minutes before it gets dried up, I removed the shiitake and cut into thin strips and dressed with a small mount of soy sauce.

I mixed all the ingredients except for the shiitake in a bowl and dressed them with ponzu shoyu ポン酢醤油 (from the bottle) and a splash of a good olive oil. I topped it with the grilled shiitake and sprinkled roasted white sesame seeds on top.

For an impromptu dish, this was a great success. The onion is strong enough but not too assertive because of the salting and soaking in water. The addition of the olive oil contributes depth of the dish. We had this with "G sake" from SakeOne. The very first US brewed sake we really like. This is a wonderful pairing. I should have made more since we had more duck breast.