Atkins, schmatkins
To hear Gil tell it, he was a bit … cuddly … and carried around an extra 40 pounds before we met. Though I’ve seen evidence of it in pictures, I still find it hard to believe, given his rangy look these days. Granted, he’s almost a foot taller than me, so that amount of weight isn’t quite the disaster it would be on someone my size, but still — it’s pretty significant. So like a lot of other people at the time, he turned to the Atkins diet for a quick fix (which happened to stick).
Even after he lost the weight, he continued to shun carbs for a long time. And then he met me. (Mooo-haaa-haa-haaaaaaaaah!) Actually, I’m not really that big of a fan of carbs, but I don’t believe in depriving myself, so we eat a pretty well-balanced diet these days. And that includes carbs — sometimes quite a lot of them, as it turned out this weekend.
Scrambling for a late lunch Saturday, I threw together what is always a no-brainer: Orecchiette with chicken sausage and broccoli rabe. It’s easy, filling, not unhealthy, and best of all, delicious. But this wasn’t to be our only pasta indulgence over the weekend, thanks to the chuckleheads working the meat counter at Zeytinia.
I asked — twice! — for two duck breasts. They repeated my order and told me with regret that the breasts were frozen into one big package and I’d have to wait for them to thaw it enough to separate two. Not a problem, since I love to browse the store, so I waited. And waited. Five minutes turned into 15, but the thought of my duck breast dinner kept me going.
When I took the package out of the fridge the following day to begin marinating the duck, imagine my surprise to find two legs where the breasts should’ve been! Allowing myself only a momentary growl, I plunged headlong into preparations for duck ragu. (I suppose I could’ve made confit, but it didn’t seem to be worth it for only two legs, and dagnabbit, I wanted duck that very day!)
Can I just say a quick thank you to the aforementioned chuckleheads for their error? Though I had to supplement the duck legs with a few chicken thighs, this dish was really, really, really good. And pretty simple, too, once the nasty business removing the visible fat from the legs/thighs was done.
I’m so happy Gil learned to be flexible with his diet once his excess weight was lost. If he hadn’t, there’s no way I could’ve attempted the carbo-loading I did this weekend, and our recipe binder would’ve been much poorer for it.
recipes after the jump