Boom Week. Duck À L’Ori.

Lori of Martha Points, is one of my more recent obsessions friends.

We met on Twitter and it’s been a wild love affair.  Full of laughs and giggles and shits. 

Or something like that.

And Lori has generously offered her time and Martha-esq talents to contribute to the Boom Chicka Boom Boom.

She’s awesome-sauce.

No really, try her sauce.

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I can cook.

I CAN!

Shut up, you people.

Honestly.

I’m also a fairly creative cook. And traditional meals don’t do a lot for me.

I like to mix it up.

This has, in the past, been characterized as “experimenting on disposable family members.”

But no one’s died.

So one year I decided that the holiday meal would be duck.

Why not?

Why do turkeys get all the glory anyway?

It’s not like a turkey ever did anything for me personally. A turkey has never given me a designer handbag or fixed my alternator.

 The duck glaze required brandy and orange liqueur.

 So I’m already liking this recipe a lot.

 Drunk duck.

But I didn’t want the duck to have all the fun.

Which you knew, of course.

 Shut with the up, already.

To my credit, I did not launch straight into the brandy or the orange liqueur.

That would be tacky.

I eased in. With champagne.

Only one glass.

By which I mean I only held one glass. I refilled it four or five times.

There was apricot jam in the glaze, too.

Apricot jam, brandy and orange liqueur.

I had very little interest in the jam.

Also, did you know that liquor stores will only sell you alcohol in generously portioned bottles?

 I only needed a cup of brandy and a half-cup of the orange stuff, but when I presented the recipe I was not directed to the “self-serve-take-only-what-you-need counter” at my friendly neighborhood Bottle Barn.

No. I was directed to shelves of bottles that all held many more cups of liquor than I actually needed and forced to purchase them

That’s right. Forced.

I had a holiday gun loaded with familial expectation and drama pointed squarely at my head.

There was only one way out.

Buy the copious amounts of booze.

But back to the duck. Which is merrily roasting (or soaking, or stewing, or salsa-dancing, whatever) away, waiting for me to clear the champagne bubbles from my head and make the damned glaze already.

I open the pretty bottles of brandy and orange liqueur and decide that there – obviously – needs to be a quality control check. So I sample. Each product.

Once or twice.

But here’s the important part.

My larger measuring cup – you know, the big kind with the handle that can measure up to two cups at a time? – had melted in the microwave.

Did you know that could happen? I didn’t either. I think either the microwave or the measuring cup or the husband at the time was defective.

So, I didn’t have a large measuring cup, I had only the little portion-specific measuring cups. And I couldn’t find either the 1 or ½ cup sizes (which may have been related to champagne consumption and the brandy sampling but I am going to blame the dog), so I am measuring out alcohol with the ¼ cup measuring cup.

Great. Now there’s math.

While I am making the glaze, I am also in a very animated discussion with my mother about something very important that I now cannot remember but that required lots of gesturing on my part. So we could have been talking politics or boobs. This meant that I needed to set the measuring cup and the various 100+  proof substances down several times in order to wave my arms around. And each time I pick them back up, I forget where I left off.

After doing this once or twice I looked at my mother and asked, “How much of this have I put in there already?”

She arched an eyebrow at me and asked, “Was I supposed to be the one counting?”

I gestured to my empty champagne glass, brandy snifter and quart jar and said, “Well we sure as hell shouldn’t be counting on me.”

We looked into the bowl that was supposed to contain one cup of apricot jam, one cup of brandy and a half-cup of orange liqueur and deduced that we had four tablespoons of apricot jam, a half-quart of brandy, and a fifth of Grand Marnier that cost approximately $32 an ounce.

Only one thing to do.

Stir it up and pour it on.

It was damned good.

And, as an extra bonus, nothing was inadvertently flambéed.

+20 Martha Points for me.