Let me tell you about this salad that chef Casey Schanen of Nell Thorn made at the cooking school the other night. Not that everything else he made wasn’t amazing, but the salad was the real eye-opener for me. Here’s what was in it: fresh arugula, roasted squash, arugula pesto, and warm ricotta cheese. Yeah.

I’ve been hearing a lot about making ricotta at home, but for whatever reason I’ve never tried it. It really is astoundingly easy, and as much as I love cold ricotta, it turns out I love fresh, warm ricotta even more. In this salad it fills the same role as fried goat cheese – the warm creaminess adds to the dressing and enriches the greens – but without the crunch (and oil). And ricotta has a fantastic springy texture in the mouth that I find addictive.

So Casey heated milk, stirred in salt and fresh lemon juice, and scooped out the curds into cheesecloth. I tossed the arugula with good olive oil and salt, and we portioned it onto plates with a sprinkle of roasted orange squash. A scoop of ricotta went on top of that, then a drizzle of garlicky arugula pesto with pumpkin seeds. That was it. I would eat salad more often if it was like this.

As I said, there were a few other good things to eat. Nell Thorn bread with castelvetrano olives, house-made pastrami, and toasted walnuts, as a starter.

Potato gnocchi with one of the best damn pork bolognese sauces I have ever eaten. The restaurant smoked their own bacon for this. It was incredible.

And a buttermilk panna cotta with a topping of pears poached with vanilla bean. I may not be a big dessert person, but I inhaled this.

Classes like this are what keep us coming back to the cooking school. Local ingredients, real technique, great flavor combinations. And if you haven’t been to Nell Thorn yet, I really think you should go.

Last week we went down to Gretchen’s to help with Knut Christiansen’s latest cooking class. Once again the theme was tapas and paella, but he mixed it up with some different dishes and approaches this time. Sadly for me, a lot of this meant almonds, but I was hardly in danger of starving.

As usual, Knut did his shopping on the way down to the class and arranged his ingredients as beautifully as possible. It almost seems a shame to chop the things up to cook them.

He began putting together tapas while starting the paella, which takes time to build. The first tapa was a fresh fig stuffed with lemon-scented almonds and incredible Cabrales cheese, broiled just long enough to make the cheese bubble and soften the fig slightly. I had one minus the almonds, and it was very good, even coming from a non-fig fan like me.

Tapa number two was a skewer of olives and almond-encrusted cheese, served with a slice of hard chorizo and a piece of grilled olive baguette slathered with goat cheese butter. The butter is one of Knut’s specialties, and this batch was made by whipping butter with Drunken Goat cheese for an incredibly long time until it became rich and silken. Dangerously good.

Then we built a little salad of boiled potato rounds, boiled egg rounds, cucumber slices, vinaigrette, aioli, and a small octopus. A little tricky to eat, but great flavors. And the octopi were, frankly, adorable.

At last, the paella. Usually Knut’s paellas are focused on Northwest specialties and are not particularly traditional, but he was practicing for a competition in Austin the following day (which he ended up winning!) and took a slightly different approach than usual. This paella featured the usual peppers, olives, mussels, clams and lemon, but he used hard chorizo instead of loose, and made roulades of fresh rockfish wrapped around a piquillo-chanterelle filling.

Finally, while the guests were working through enormous portions of paella, Knut threw together a simple apple salad with almonds and tarragon. Raw apples and almonds are a double mouth-hive whammy for me, so I didn’t try it, but it seemed to go over well.

It was a late night, but very fine food.

We helped out at Gretchens Cooking School last night for the first time this season. This one was a food and wine pairing, with Jim Kowalski of Farm to Market Bakery doing the food and Renee Stark of Noble Wines providing the drink. Jim has a really nice feel for flavors – if you haven’t checked out his place in Edison I sincerely urge you to do so.

The menu for the class included green salads with tomato-goat cheese crostini, handmade fettucine alfredo with fresh Dungeness crab, and pear-ginger tarts. The salads were drizzled with a maple syrup and balsamic vinegar dressing which was surprisingly delicious, and Renee’s choice of a light French rose was a good match with the goat cheese toasts. I’m not generally a huge fan of green salad, especially when the dressing isn’t tossed with the greens, but this was very good.

I wasn’t keeping track of Jim’s alfredo recipe, as I was kept busy cranking out more fettucine, but I know it had a lot of cream.

The sauce was served over a pile of fresh pasta and a handful of crab meat, then topped with a pinch of heirloom tomato, shredded basil, and toasted pine nuts. It was just as tasty (and rich) as it looks. A Sauvignon Blanc was a very good match for this, its grapefruit flavors cutting through the cream.

Finally, slices of pear-ginger pie went out. Jim won’t divulge his proprietary pie crust recipe, but you can buy his pies at the bakery and try to suss it out. Renee brought a tawny port for this, which seemed to go over well.

If you’re interested in taking classes at Gretchens, they have just started up for the season and should have plenty of openings left. I want to make a special plug for the wine tastings – they’re affordable, educational and have great food, and if they don’t get enough reservations our favorites will be cancelled, which would make me sad.

Also, Gretchens is trying to get their Facebook page off and running. Check it out!

I tend to think I make a pretty good pie. Last Easter I made a strawberry rhubarb pie that vanished within seconds, and the Easter before that the blackberry pie I baked caused grown women to wander around the house moaning softly with delight. Every Christmas I bake sweet potato pie with bourbon (one of my personal favorites), and my Missouri-born husband thinks I make the best pecan pie he’s ever had. That said, however, when Kate McDermott contacted me about taking one of her Art of the Pie classes, you can bet I didn’t turn her down. For every prize winner I’ve turned out, there’s also been a sodden mess somewhere along the line, and I’ve always been curious which things are truly important in pie baking, as opposed to simply customary. In other words, how does it all really work?

So last Sunday, on a muggy afternoon in downtown Seattle, I joined five other women (including my friend Patricia of the blog Cook Local - see her post on the class here), to learn more of the mysteries of pie. Kate sets aside four hours for these classes, which turns out to be about perfect. We sat down at 3, and by 7 we were all walking out with hot pies.

Unlike most cooking classes I’ve watched or participated in, this one really focused on learning to do things yourself. With so few students, we could all easily watch Kate as she demonstrated each step, and then we each made our own pie under her careful eye. There was plenty of time for questions, and she made it very clear that there was no wrong way to do it. She began with a pep talk on Crust Fear (a common phobia), then made a batch of dough to demonstrate. She bakes the way I do, with a general notion of quantities but without being a stickler for exact measurements. When we all got up to the counter to try making our own doughs, we were given one measuring spoon and a coffee cup to work with, and expected to eyeball the rest.

Kate’s crust is made from very specific ingredients: King Arthur flour, Kerrygold Irish butter, leaf lard, salt, and ice water, whereas I tend to use Stone Buhr Shepherd’s Grain flour and Challenge butter.  The big difference between Kate’s crust and mine, though, is that hers is much shorter – that is, she uses twice as much shortening as I do. For a double crust pie, she adds 8 oz of butter and 8 Tbsp of lard. This makes a crust which is extremely tender, an approach I usually only take for tarts. It is, as you might expect, extremely tasty, and quite forgiving to work with. We all mixed up our doughs, patted them into rounds, wrapped them up in plastic and tucked them into the fridge while we started on fillings.

Since we’re not in any particular fruit season (rhubarb is past, strawberries yet to come, nowhere near apples), we each had a choice of frozen fruit: boysenberry, sour cherry or blueberry. One lucky person had the option of making a Shaker Lemon Pie, and Patricia jumped on that one (she then got to do lots of lemon slicing). I chose boysenberry. Our fillings, like the crusts, were not measured out very precisely – we simply dumped fruit into our pie pans to just below the rim, then put it into a mixing bowl with a handful of flour, a handful of tapioca, a pinch of salt and a grating of nutmeg. When our dough had chilled enough, we rolled it out and assembled our pies, then popped them all into the oven.

While our pies baked, checked frequently by Kate and making the kitchen (and the surrounding area outside, to judge by the number of passersby craning their necks) smell wonderful, we ate slices of a previously baked lemon pie and listened to Kate read us words of wisdom on the tao of pie baking. She believes firmly in the virtue of pie made with love and intention, and encourages us all to go out and share the knowledge of pie. 

Everyone’s pies came out beautifully. We headed home with our finished pie, a tub of leaf lard to play with at home, a set of Kate’s recipes, and a fresh appreciation for the art of pie baking. And the car smelled wonderful the entire drive home.

The theme for Casey Schanen and Tom Saunderson’s class at Gretchen’s last week was ostensibly Seafood with Wine Pairings. If you ask me, the real theme was Butter.

This was some of our mise en place – see that pile of butter pats on the plate? We used most of that over the course of the evening.

We put together an appetizer plate for the guests so they’d have something to nibble on right away. There were fresh radishes and turnips, Nell Thorn bread and rosemary crackers, all being dunked into an amazing dip of butter whipped with green olives. Yes, it looks like guacamole – but it ain’t. Caution is advised, as this stuff is addictive.

The first course was a seared scallop on a bed of sauteed endive and turnip greens, glazed with a mixture of butter and chestnut honey and topped with parmesan curls. Chestnut honey has an assertive flavor, and it worked surprisingly well here.

Next up was a piece of seared and baked halibut, served with fluffy spinach gnocchi topped with asparagus and leeks. Wait, was there no butter on this? There probably was. [Update: There was not butter. But there was cream. - ed.]

Then came salmon. Each piece was topped with a chunk of butter and baked, so the butter sank down into the fish.

The pieces were served with a saute of thinly sliced radishes and turnips and fresh peas, along with delicate ravioli stuffed with fresh peas and feta. A lemon beurre blanc went over the top. I was full when this plate was served, but it was far too wonderful to pass up.

All this great buttery stuff was paired with wine brought by Tom, all produced in coastal areas. They were excellent, and went so well with the food that I almost forgot to notice the wine.

I particularly loved the albariño, which was fabulous with the rich halibut. All the wines did a fine job of cutting through the butter and leaving the mouth clean for another bite.

After all that, there was dessert. I was completely unable to cope with it after inhaling those ravioli, but it was very nice: buttermilk panna cotta with berry sauce. I’m fairly certain there was no actual butter in this.

It was a good class. As always, with those two.

In addition to all the other stuff we’ve been doing this month, we’ve helped out at three different classes at Gretchen’s Cooking School: Peter Belknap’s class on the food of Marseille, an all-Malbec tasting with Renee Stark of Noble Wines, and tapas with Knut Christianson. Lots of chopping, lots of dishes, and some fabulous food and wine. Here are some pictures showing highlights from the various classes (click on the images to see more info at my Flickr account).

Sorry for the radio silence this past week, but for the last eight days I’ve been out of commission with the nastiest cold/allergy/something-or-other I’ve ever had the displeasure of suffering through. Hack, cough. I’ve been eating, but for several days I completely lost my sense of taste – a distressing state of affairs.

Early in the week, Jon and I were signed up to help with a cooking class taught by our friend Peter. I felt that the customers might not appreciate my coughing into their food, so Jon went on his own, and he came back laden with fabulous leftovers. The class theme was Southern food, in particular New Orleans-style, featuring shrimp fritters, cornbread and chicken-sausage gumbo, and there was more than enough food for everyone. I lived off of that gumbo for the next several days, it being one of the few things that could penetrate my personal fog.

If you’ve managed to catch the crud yourself and need some hot soup full of pork fat, or if you’re just in the mood to celebrate Fat Tuesday with a little gumbo, here’s the recipe.

Fayetta’s Down Home Chicken Sausage Gumbo

recipe from Peter Belknap

• 1 large chicken, cut into pieces
• 6 Tbsp oil or lard
• 1 1/2 lb smoked sausage
• 1/2 cup flour
• 1 onion, minced
• 1 red pepper, minced
• 1 green pepper, minced
• 1 yellow pepper, minced
• 4-5 stalks celery, minced
• 2 Tbsp minced garlic
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• 3 bay leaves
• 2 allspice berries
• 2 tsp salt (or to taste)
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1/4 tsp cayenne (or to taste)
• 1/4 cup hot sauce
• 1/2 cup green onion tops
• 2-3 Tbsp chopped parsley
• file powder to taste
• 3 quarts chicken broth or more
• Optional additions: okra, oysters, prawns, carrot (I can personally recommend prawns, peeled and simmered in the hot gumbo until just done)

Fry the chicken parts until brown, remove from pan. Fry sausages until brown, remove from pan. Add oil to the drippings until it totals 1/2 cup of fat. Add flour and cook the roux until brown. Add vegetables and cook until soft. Add seasonings and hot sauce, then add broth. Return chicken and sausage to pot, cook gently one hour. Remove bones from the chicken and chop up the meat, putting it back in the pan. Add the green onions and parsley, simmer another minute or so and serve over rice. Pass file powder at the table.

On the third and final day of Duckfest, we made confit, rillettes and pâté.

When we got to the farm on Sunday morning, the table was well laden with leftover bagels, plus a few sheets of freshly made cinnamon rolls.

As we ate breakfast, Kate was beginning the process of rendering the duck fat we’d collected off the carcasses the previous day. She was careful not to get the fat too hot – just enough to melt most of it off of the solids, but not enough to crisp them up.

She removed the bits of skin and meat and set them aside, and brought the fat just to a light simmer, as if making stock.

When the fat was the right temperature, we dried the salted duck pieces off well and added them in gradually. The legs went in first, then the breasts and wings, and eventually the necks and gizzards. Kate continued to stir the pot while the fat simmered, monitoring the temperature so it wouldn’t get too hot.

When the meat was suitably tender, perhaps an hour later (the slower the better), she removed the duck from the fat. What remained in the pot was true liquid gold, to be jarred up and used later.

We divided the confited pieces among vacuum-seal bags, and ladled in duck fat over each before sealing them up.

The bags of confit went outside to cool down for a bit before going into the fridge. We got to take some home, with the assurance that the confit will just get better with time.

The bits of skin left over from the rendering were put into a skillet and crisped up into cracklings. Except for the occasional pinfeather (oops), it was like super-crisp duck fat popcorn. They make excellent croutons!

Earlier, while the confit simmered, we had all gathered around the kitchen table and begun picking meat off the duck carcasses, which Neal and Kate had finished in a pressure cooker. It didn’t seem at first as if we’d get much, they were stripped so clean already, but we ended up with quite a decent pile of duck meat.

Our hands were very well moisturized after this effort.

The picked-over carcasses were taken out to the dock for the fishies and birdies…

Then Kate enlisted a few other sets of hands to help her go over the picked meat, shredding it finely and pulling out any stray bones or gristle.

The shredded meat became almost like dough as Kate kneaded it. I’m afraid I didn’t see what else went in (Fat? Seasonings? Kate, can you help me out?) The end result was rillettes, a delicious rich spread. Normally rillettes get packed into jars and topped with fat for storage, but this batch just got set aside for lunch.

While all these other things were going on, Kate was also making liver pâté.

She took the hearts and livers that we had set aside the day before, tossed them in the cuisinart, and mixed them up with Armagnac (universal seasoning of Gascony) and lard (that’s homemade lard on the plate up above, not mashed potatoes). The mixture was packed raw into canning jars, which were put into a water bath in the oven to simultaneously cook and seal. We got to bring one of these home as well.

Eventually we took a short break, then retired to the dining room for a late lunch before leaving.

We had the finished rillettes for lunch, piled on toasts rubbed with garlic.

The oysters that we failed to finish off on Friday night were turned into chowder, with the help of plenty of homemade bacon and fresh Jersey cream from Bridget the Cow up the road. On top of the rillettes, it was ferociously filling, but too delicious not to have seconds.

For dessert there was a clafoutis, made from fresh creamy milk and farm-picked prunes soaked in Armagnac.

It was very different than my usual breakfast clafoutis, which is baked in a cast iron pan and comes out caramelized and crusty. This was soft, sweet and custardy, dissolving in the mouth, with the prunes providing a deep, earthy counter point.

Finally, the ferry ride home, sure that we wouldn’t need to eat again for days.

On the second day, we slaughtered ducks.

Or, to be more precise, some of us slaughtered ducks, and we all plucked, butchered and ate them.

As you might expect, there are some slightly graphic photos in this post (although I left out the worst ones) so proceed at your own risk.

The day began cool and misty.

We met at the farm for strong coffee and vast quantities of freshly made bagels with homemade butter and smoked salmon. The bagels were fantastic – Neal’s wife is an amazing baker.

Garbing ourselves in fetching outfits and accompanied by extremely excited farm dogs, we went out to the duck shed and listened to Neal expound on the finer points of humane slaughter.

You have two main goals when killing an animal for meat: to spare them pain and fear, and to avoid doing anything that will decrease the quality of the meat. Neal uses a cone to confine the bird, then cleanly slits its throat (without cutting the spine) and lets it bleed out. If done correctly, the duck dies instantly, with no trauma.

Neal demonstrated the first duck. It was all over very quickly.

Did I kill a duck? No, I didn’t. I may have just been rationalizing my own fear, but I felt that it wasn’t fair for me to try killing an animal and possibly botch the job, causing it unnecessary pain, just so I could say I had done it. It would be a different story if I was planning on raising ducks and needed the practice.

That was just my own feeling. Two students in the class did successfully slaughter ducks, though, and they did a good job. The rest of us were content to watch.

After the duck has bled out, plucking is the next step. You can dry pluck, which produces a very high quality bird that keeps well, but it’s very time consuming. Since we were doing ten ducks, wet plucking was the way to go.

For the ducks’ hot water bath we were using a turkey fryer on a gas burner, which worked pretty well. The water had a bit of Dawn dish soap added in to help with the oil in the duck feathers. Each bird was lowered into the water and dunked several times, then hung by the feet in the plucking shed. This part smelled really, really bad – the clouds of hot duck steam began to send people running into the fresh air each time a new duck came into the shed.

Plucking takes a really, really long time.

The last of the pinfeathers are really hard to get out by hand. Neal showed us how to removed them by singeing (stinky and dangerous-looking), and by waxing (time consuming). Kate had brought a bottle of powdered pine resin from France, which gets rubbed into the duck feathers before dunking, and that made the plucking process a heck of a lot easier. We took to calling it the Magic French Powder.

Mostly it was lots of careful finger work. Fingernails helped.

Eventually, we broke for lunch, which was rabbit stew with potato dumplings, plus all the leftover cheeses and terrines from the day before. It made a very welcome break from the morning’s activities.

Later that afternoon, after a bit of recuperation, we butchered the ducks.

We gathered around the big farmhouse table with cutting boards, aprons and sharp boning knives.

Kate handed out a duck apiece so we could each try to clean and joint a bird. I don’t have any pictures of the process, since my hands were covered in raw duck, but suffice it to say it was a bit tricky (Neal helped us out while Kate demonstrated). Eventually we had a bowl of duck pieces for confit, a bowl of fat, a bowl of hearts and livers, and a pile of cleaned and sectioned gizzards (I wish I’d gotten a picture of those, they’re very cool looking). A relatively small amount of waste went into a bucket – mostly feet – but we would be using almost the entire bird for various dishes. The pieces for the confit (wings, legs, breasts, gizzards and necks) were well salted and laid in a tub, to be finished the following day.

For dinner that night, we each contributed one breast (called a magret) from our duck, trimmed and skinned, and Kate marinated them in Armagnac and mustard. She seared them, leaving them nice and rare, and made a pan sauce with shallots and some duck blood (which Julian, thinking it was chocolate, dipped a finger into and was somewhat startled).

There followed an argument as to whether we should have polenta or potatoes alongside. We ended up having both – potatoes roasted in duck fat (ohmigod) and soft polenta topped with duck skin cracklings (whoo).

To balance out the duck, there was also a good pile of broccoli cooked with garlic.

And wine, of course. And goody bags of local products (including madrona bark tea!) decorated by Neal’s daughters. And a pear tarte tatin for dessert. And more coffee and Armagnac. It was a good thing we were walking back to our room.

We dreamed about duck feathers all night.

Despite growing up around livestock (my family raised dairy goats, chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep and rabbits at various times), I’ve never had much to do with the process of turning a live animal into food. I’m not particularly bothered by the idea of eating animals, as long as they are raised well and killed humanely. All of our food comes from other living things, whether plant or animal. However, it’s a little different when you’ve met the animal you are going to eat, and even more so when you are present at, or responsible for, its death.

Jon and I have been buying more and more of our meat locally, and currently have pork, beef and lamb in our freezer from Skagit and Snohomish County farmers. We haven’t yet found a good source for chickens or ducks, but we’re working on it. But the more we buy whole animals straight from the farm, the more we realize how little we know about actual slaughter and butchering practices, and how to get the most from an animal. I don’t picture us raising animals for meat (not on our current property, anyway), but I really feel that knowing our meat from the ground up makes us better cooks.

Hence Duckfest, a workshop designed for just this sort of situation. We spent the first weekend of 2010 on Shaw Island in Puget Sound, learning to slaughter, butcher and cook ducks. The class was put on by chef and farmer Neal Foley, aka Podchef, and by chef, teacher and author Kate Hill, who graciously came out from her farm and cooking school in Gascony to demonstrate cassoulet and confit making. I love her book (sadly out of print at the moment), and I’ve been wanting to visit her school for a long time, so this was a wonderful opportunity – a taste of France just a few miles from our house!

The workshop lasted three days. We ate a vast amount of amazing food and took far too many pictures, so to spare my patient readers I’ll be writing it up in three installments. Here is day one (Cassoulet):

On the first day, we got up far too early. It was New Year’s Day, and I had a potato chip hangover, but we made it to the ferry dock in Anacortes with plenty of time to spare. The wind was howling down Rosario Strait, and the ferry ride was unusually alarming, as the boat wallowed from side to side and sudden crashes emanated from the lower decks. We (and our car) made it to Shaw Island intact, however, and were met by Podchef himself (henceforth referred to as Neal, as that is his actual name). We deposited our bags at the monastery guesthouse and proceeded on to lunch at Neal’s farm with most of the other attendees.

This was the view from the house. Not bad, hm? The first day it was storming and there were whitecaps across the bay, but the rest of the weekend it was gorgeous and smooth. A wonderful place.

This was the lunch: rabbit terrine and pate, red onion jam, quince membrillo, homemade baguette and buttermilk crackers (only the BEST CRACKERS EVER), cheese (both homemade and storebought), extremely fine pickles, and a very nice dry rose wine. Between all this and the bottles of Lillet that started things off, we were all pretty relaxed. We went out to meet the ducks, then took a break to wander around the island before reconvening for our first cooking lesson.

That afternoon, Kate made cassoulet, one of her specialties. The beans (gorgeous, enormous cannellinis, graciously donated by Steve at Rancho Gordo) had been set to soak earlier. She put them on to cook, just covering them with water. Carrots and celery went into the pot, along with plenty of thyme and a few pieces of fresh pork rind, plus a sprinkle of the secret cassoulet seasoning, epices Rabelais.

Neal had killed some ducks a few days before, so we would have confit for the cassoulet. He had also made two kinds of sausages from his pigs: Toulouse sausage, which is a simple ground pork sausage, and pork rind sausage, which is made from chopped pig skin and fat and turns out to be one of the most delicious things on the planet.

When the beans were done, a few strips of pork rind went into the bottom of the two cassoles. Some beans went in, then a layer of confit pieces. More beans, then whole sausages. Then still more beans on top, and the bean broth added until it came up just to the edge of the bowl.

By the way, you may have heard that a cassoulet should have breadcrumbs on top. Don’t do it! Kate emphasized that you want a crispy crust on top from the beans themselves. As the cassoulet bakes, you will be breaking the crust and pushing it back into the liquid several times. If you put breadcrumbs on top but then push them in, you will end up with a cassoulet full of breadcrumbs. So just say no!

While the cassoulet quietly did its thing in the oven, we had a little snack to tide us over. Kate had brought tins of freshly packed foie gras from one of her local producers in Gascony, and we did a taste-testing of duck liver terrine, goose liver terrine, rillettes, and foie gras-stuffed duck hearts. The popular vote went to the rillettes, followed by the goose liver, which seemed to be a touch sweeter than the duck. There was Champagne to go with the foie gras, and then the pan of oysters came out.

Kate picked these up from Jon Rowley on her way up from Seattle. It was a nice selection from our usual oyster source, Taylor Shellfish, including Olympias, Kumamotos, Pacific extra-smalls, and Virginicas. We ate quite a few oysters (the dog got some, too), then Neal produced a bottle of Laphroaig and we had to eat a few more splashed with the Scotch.

By the time the cassoulet was done we weren’t as hungry as we might have wished, but we applied ourselves.

The two cassoles were brought to the table, crusty brown on top and blazingly hot. With a fresh green salad and plenty of wine, we stuffed ourselves silly.

Some people even had room for dessert. Unluckily (or luckily) for me, it was a gorgeous Paris-Brest covered with almonds, so I had to plead allergic and stick to coffee and Armagnac. It was lovely.

Stay tuned for Day Two of Duckfest, where we learn how to kill, pluck and butcher ducks. If you just can’t wait, you can check out all my pictures from the weekend on my Flickr account.