Goodbye Portugal

After we left the farm we headed to Porto where the first thing we did was eat Chinese food and the second thing we did was get into the shower and stay there for a long long time.  We spent the night in a cute little film themed hostel with endless cups of tea in a red Amelie inspired room. We tried to hit up the Porto nightlife but for some reason everything was closed. 11:30 pm is too early on a Thursday night?  The next day we walked around Porto a bit until it was time to pick up our sweet little rental Hyndai. 

Everything will be alright?

"do you know this mustache?"

A tribute to Portuguese writer Jose Saramage, author of Blindness. 

I loved this little guy!

This was an outdoor/indoor market in Porto that we ran through on the way to pick up our rental car 

we wished we could have stayed and looked around. 

On our agenda was PORT wine tasting in the Unesco World Heritage site of the Douro Valley (Brandon says that sounds snooty-I think it does too!), the only place in the world that Port Wine can officially be made. The ride through the Douro Valley was amazingly beautiful with houses on steep terraced hillsides with regional varieties of grapes.

We stopped at one vineyard where we tried 7 Ports and a lovely lady served us wine with Jennifer translating the whole time. Half way through the tasting we asked her if she spoke English. Oh yes she did, perfectly in fact, so here Jennifer was translating haltingly, trying to understand the Portuguese descriptions, remember them and then explain the subtleties of Portuguese Port, while the whole time our pourer spoke fluently! She must have had a laugh.

After Brandon bought a bottle for us to drink later, we made our way to Pinhao, a tiny little town on the Douro River.

First and only time I've ever partook in drinking an entire bottle of Port in one go. 

We stopped into a butcher shop to get some cheese to go with our wine and were surprised with the most amazing experience. After letting us try generous tastes of every cheese they had, the butcher brought out their homemade liquor, gave us samples of almost every one of their home smoked and cured meats and treated us to homemade wine with grilled bacon and chorizo. The butcher kept asking us if we were in a hurry, to which we responded gleefully “no!” We spent about an hour an a half there and left with a bag full of  salami, prosciutto, blood sausage, smoked ham, cheese and bread.

Brandon says that if he had more control of his masculinity, he would have been weeping at the butcher shop. I also told the butcher that my husband was in heaven to which he sweetly smiled.

Drive by shooting

Beauty

Brandon in a meat trance (the black thing behind him is a boar face)

sorry vegetarians

The piece on the right is a pound of prosciutto

After a night of Port and pork (and chocolate too-apparently they go well together) we arrived in Aveiro where we played in the Portuguese indoor Ultimate championships (our goal is to find Ultimate wherever we go).  We had a great time with these friendly Ultimate players who hug and have a heart to heart with their opponents after each game.  The day was capped with a rollicking dinner for 50, almost all of the club Ultimate players in Portugal (watch the video till the end and you’ll see Ultimate players doing what they do best: get themselves in trouble). We were lucky to be able to crash at a teammate’s house for a few hours before our flight out of lovely Portugal, a destination definitely worth a second visit!

Idle Hands Part 2: Things Get Real

****Warning This Blog Post Contains Graphic Images of Dead Duck****

Our time at the farm in Portugal has come to an end but before we left, we busy bees got up to a few more things. A lot of our todo was what ado about ducks. There were a lot of duckies and they were increasingly becoming middle-aged, which in Duck terms means their meat gets tougher as their muscles develop more and more. So several were called up to fulfill their purpose of the farm, that is to feed and nourish those who work and live there.

The first task was to butcher the animals. With the guidance of Andrea, the farmer, Brandon preformed this job. The cleanest way to do this is pierce the space between the jugular vein/throat and the spinal column with a sharp knife. Then turn the knife down and cut the vein and throat and finally separating the head from the body.

 

Faithful wife Jennifer catches the blood to be mixed with wine and used later for cooking

 After the body relaxes it is time to pluck the duck. We first plucked it dry which was slow going.

With the second and third ducks we dunked the ducks in boiling water which made the feathers come off a lot easier but made for a messier affair.

A blowtorch helps remove the small feathers

Once the feathers were all off it was time to remove the "nasty bits"

Brandon proud of keeping the entire digestive tract intact

But what do you do with three dead ducks?

With the first duck we made Cantonese roast duck. This involves boiling the duck for a few minutes, drying it, filling the cavity with a liquid marinade and then sowing the duck shut, putting a honey glaze over it then hanging it up to dry for a few hours. After all that we roasted it.

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Final product served with scallion pancakes and tahini turnips

With the second and third ducks we worked on preserving the meat for as long as possible. Brandon made duck rillette, duck pancetta, and the Holy Grail: cold-smoked duck bacon.

Rillette is meat that is chopped up and slow cooked in its own fat and salt. Can be shelf stable for a few weeks.

First step to the rillette was to render all the fat from the two ducks.

Sweet delicious golden duck fat (two jars full)

 

 

For the pancetta we made a salt mixture of salt, thyme, cayenne pepper, nutmeg, and cumin seeds. The duck breasts were covered in the fat and then left to hang for 1 week. Unfortunately, we left the farm prior to trying the pancetta.

Ready to be hung

The most fun was making the bacon. We put two duck breast in a salt brine for 6 hours during which time Brandon made a cold smoker!

The bricks on the left are the beginnings of the smoke chamber where the duck will be. On the right is a hole where the smoking pear wood will be placed. An underground channel connects the two chambers to direct and cool the smoke

Look at those breasts

On the right is where the pear wood was smoking (covered in dirt to trap the smoke). The wood on the left is covering the chamber where the duck is smoking. The bucket with the fire on the far left had a hole in the bottom which was used to draw the smoke toward the duck.

Rotate!

All the work was worth it. The Duck bacon was delicious after soaked up smoke for about 5-6 hours and the farm smelled of rotisserie chicken for the next two days.

On non-duck related events Jen made calendula salve on her last day of work. She had had calendula sitting in olive oil for a month prior.

Melting beeswax and lanolin into the calendula oil

Tinning the salve

She added thyme and rosemary to spice it up.  It makes lovely lip balm!

We have now left the farm and have spent an incredible last few days in Portugal, and are now sitting in Madrid on the eve of our next chapter in Morocco.