Out of Commission/Ridiculously Delicious Challenge #1

*Please forgive the gratuitous duck picture.  I couldn’t bare looking at a completely colorless post.  Also I think I’m really funny.

Due to an unfortunate accident involving a faulty tupperware container, this soup, and my computer, I will be unable to share beautiful photos and recipes with you for the next 5 to 10 business days.  Well, I could share recipes, but they wouldn’t have any pictures and would therefore be super boring.  Severely disappointing, I know, especially given that I was all set to show off one of my favorite healthy breakfasts and my favorite completely unhealthy hot fudge recipe.  Luckily, I was recently informed that February is the the kick-off month of Marx Foods’ “Ridiculously Delicious Challenge,” a 4 stage competition which I am allowed to participate in because I’m awesome.  Or maybe because I’m talented.  Or maybe because I’m just the best.  Oh wait… I’m actually only included because I was lucky enough to win something else from Marx Foods courtesy of a random number generator that just so happened to fall on my random number.  So we’ll just stick with “I’m lucky.”

The first part of the challenge is to choose 3 items from a list of Marx Food products and create an imaginary recipe from them.  Thankfully, creating imaginary recipes is very conducive to owning soup-soaked electronics.  The list of 21 foods includes 10 kinds of meat, 7 pastry staples, and 4 fruits/vegetables.  While it would be totally excellent to win 9 pounds of boar ribs, 10 pounds of venison/bison/llama/yak burgers, AND 9 pounds of specialty sausages with names like “Wild Boar Sausage with Cranberries and Shiraz,” a. I would be the biggest walking heart attack on the planet, and b. it would be very hard to create an interesting dish made solely of 27 pounds of meat.  So I was faced with some serious decisions.

The meat was the easiest – first of all, I could rule out salmon, oysters, and “live geoducks,” which, to my great disappointment, are not actually live ducks that are somehow related to geology or geodes or something else awesome, but repulsive looking shellfish-y things.  No offense geoducks, you just aren’t my style, seeing as how you come from the sea and all.  Deciding between the quail and the burgers and the sausages and the ribs and the duck was a little harder… but I really love duck.  I order it every chance I get, but I’ve never tried cooking it.  I’ve always been too afraid that I’ll mess it up.  But with 24 breasts?  I could even totally butcher 2 or 3 and really have duck down by the 24th try.  Very appealing.

So duck.  And because duck and fruit are a must, and they are already frozen and so have  little risk of not being eaten before going bad by little old me, huckleberries.  Lastly, vanilla beans, because I’m finding the idea of a huckleberry, wine, and ginger sauce ever so slightly scented of vanilla very intriguing.

And there you have it, that’s my entry: pekin duck breasts, frozen huckleberries, and madagascar vanilla beans.  The recipe: a pan-seared duck with a vanilla-scented huckleberry wine sauce, served over a creamy polenta, or perhaps a savory polenta cake.  I’m kind of getting hungry just imagining it.