Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [82]
Make it or buy it? Make it.
Hassle: Very slight
Cost comparison: French’s yellow mustard: $0.07 per tablespoon. Homemade: $0.22 per tablespoon. Grey Poupon Country Dijon: $0.33 per tablespoon.
½ cup yellow mustard seeds
2 tablespoons dry mustard
⅓ cup vinegar (berry vinegar, is nice though your mustard will be redder) plus 1 tablespoon
1 tablespoon sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt
2 garlic cloves, peeled
1. In a spice grinder, grind the mustard seeds—they won’t totally break down—with the dry mustard. It will look a little like wheat germ.
2. Scrape the mixture into a small bowl and stir in ½ cup water. Cover and let rest at room temperature overnight.
3. Scrape the mixture into a blender or food processor and add the vinegar, sugar, salt, and garlic. Liquefy. Scrape down the sides. Taste the mustard and add more vinegar if necessary to form a spreadable condiment.
4. Store in a jar in the refrigerator and wait at least a week before eating.
Makes 1¼ cups
CHAPTER 12
DUCK EGGS
April is the cruelest month for the spouses of animal lovers. On a sunny April afternoon, a year after I brought home the chickens, I went to buy them some cracked corn at the feed store. There, on the floor, sat a deep bin lit by an orange heat lamp and inside, quivering and twitching, was a mass of tiny downy ducklings. Some were black and some were yellow, like Ping, and they all had exquisite miniature rounded bills. I went to the cash register and asked for a cardboard box.
I brought four ducklings home and put them in a cage on the office floor.
“I can’t believe we have ducks!” cried Owen when he got home.
Isabel raised her eyebrows and disappeared to her room.
Mark stood looking down at the cage.
“I know,” I said. “But supposedly they lay a lot of eggs.”
“They are very cute,” he said.
Cute. And slovenly. It should have come as no surprise that ducks like water. Within hours they had splashed the contents of their drinking bowl around the cage and onto the wood floor. I moved them to the laundry room and replaced the shredded newspaper bedding. I came back after another hour to find the bedding soaked once again, and exuberantly soiled. By the end of the day it was papier-mâché. By the next morning, it reeked. Animal cages smell bad enough when they’re dry; they smell worse when they’re wet. I changed the feculent bedding in that cage daily, and each time, the ducklings scrambled into a corner, squealing, piling one on top of the other to avoid me. Ducks may be domesticated, but they aren’t friendly.
Soon the room smelled so noxious, I didn’t want to do laundry anymore. When we’d had them only ten days, I filled a plastic baby pool with water, and put the ducklings out in the yard with the chickens.
Three of our ducks turned out to be Indian Runners, a skinny, flightless bird from Java, tall and upright with a long neck that almost resembles a snake. Beatrix Potter’s Jemima Puddle-Duck is thought to be an Indian Runner. They were very weird looking and they were, unfortunately, all boys. The fourth duck, and only female, was a brown Rouen duck. “They make fine roasting ducks and have abundant, delicately flavored flesh,” reports the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy. I was done with slaughter, and this duck’s abundant, delicately flavored flesh was useless to me.
Rouen ducks are not known for their egg production, but ours proved herself a champion layer. When she was about five months old, she delivered her first egg—long and heavy with a very hard, waxy white shell. Thereafter, she produced an egg almost every day and I scrambled them and fried them and they tasted like chicken eggs, except they were slightly richer and higher in cholesterol, and the yolks were the lurid orange of a California poppy.
Just as there are cat