Livin’ On the Edge – Part I

Pardon me if I go out on a limb for this post, but that’s where all the fruit is.

And let’s start with fruit. I mean real fruit, the kind with seeds. Any botanist will back me up: every piece of fruit is simply an ovary for that particular plant. The ovary contains the hope for the next generation of apple trees / watermelon vines / raspberry bushes / etc. Keep that in mind as I digress for a bit.

When it comes to my choices in food, some may call me eccentric. Some may call me just to find out what I’m having for lunch. It happened just a few short weeks ago. I remember it as if it were yesterday… (Insert Dream Sequence Music here)

I had purchased a duck at the farmer’s market in Hollywood. Healthy Family Farms in Santa Paula… wonderful people and an excellent farm. The process of disassembling a duck, chicken, or other bird before cooking it is very meditative for me. There are certain steps that gently request your attention to their appropriate order, or else you might miss out on all that the bird has to offer. My primary motivation for taking the duck apart, instead of just tossing it in the oven and living off leftovers for a week, was that I wanted to make soup with the carcass. To get to this point, I wanted to remove the skin and as much of the meat as possible. My experience was confirmed by what we learned in class this week, that most of the fat in the body is right beneath the skin. Anatomy meets Nourishing Traditions, you could say. I planned to cut up the skin in little pieces, toss that in the oven, and voila! Duck cracklins and pure duck buttah.

Are you still thinking about my fruit-as-ovary introduction? I hope so, because the duck-fat-beneath-the-skin reference ties in beautifully, just wait.

First, I cut along the vertebrae and the breastbone, and then made transverse cuts to either side, so that I could pull off the skin. This was actually a lot easier than I thought, but a bit messy (so no pictures this time). This is the meditative part, because removing the skin took MUCH longer than cutting off the meat. Finally, the pieces of skin were crisping up nicely in a 250 degree oven (Fahrenheit, mind you). About 2 hours in total, and the smell is outrageous (in a delicious way, the kind that induces salivation).

Imagine my surprise when I measured out more than ONE CUP of rendered duck fat! I’ve done this with so-called ‘free-range’ chickens, and never gotten anywhere close to even half a Cup of schmaltz for the same amount of effort. Happily, Healthy Family Farms doesn’t ship. If you want to try this, best seek out someone who’s doing it right closer to your neighborhood.

But duck cracklins…. ahhhh.. that’s the real prize. Melt-in-your-mouth, crunchy, blessed duckness. If you haven’t seen homemade cracklins, you will have no idea what they are, in the event that, oh, I don’t know, some guy were to take out a jar containing said cracklins out of his bag and start snacking contentedly on handful after blessed handful, just across the table from you.

That’s me. I’m that guy. Snackin’ on cracklins.

Or rather, I was that guy. And the emotions that played across my fellow students’ faces during our Anatomy class were a mixture of… what? Shock? Amusement? Bewilderment? Perhaps I flatter myself by thinking that everyone would immediately want to try some. They asked what I was eating, and I answered… but no takers.

OK, here comes the punchline, the first of several. Ready?

One of my friends in the class, whose expression was an unidentifiable blend of horror, anxiety, and anticipation (waiting to see what would happen to me once I finished eating, perhaps?), asked me quite pointedly why I was so interested in the skin.

I pointed out to her that we had just learned all about the different layers of the skin in the human body. How one of the skin’s primary functions was protection of everything beneath. What I was trying to impress upon her, and everyone within earshot (which included our professor by this point), is that Nature is too smart not to employ multiple redundancies in her defense strategies. Meaning that the skin of a human (or a duck, or a piece of fruit), is far more than simply a mechanical barrier to invaders.

The skin of a piece of fruit may serve to protect the hope of the next generation, but the skin of a duck protects both this generation and the next.

That’s why I’m so interested in the skin.

But this is only the beginning. More surprisingly-delicious snacks – for both the mind and the palate – are coming up soon, in Livin’ On the Edge, Part II.

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