Day after Thanksgiving tryptophan comas

It has been a lazy holiday day—well, lazy if you don’t count housecleaning and some desultory day-after-Thanksgiving shopping (at Lowes, so I’m not sure it really counts).

Tonight I repeated the sautéed duck breast recipe from last night (when I bought the breasts from Larry’s, I didn’t realize the package had four breasts, not two. It made me feel slightly better about paying more that $25 for duck breasts). I made one change: instead of doing the apricot sauce, I did a pan sauce with drippings from the cooked duck, onion, fresh herbs (sage, rosemary, and thyme) from our garden, salt, pepper, veal stock, white wine, and a little butter. It was much better.

We had the duck with some steamed green beans dressed with olive oil, lemon, and sea salt, and the rest of the bottle of the 1993 CastelGiocondo Brunello di Montalcino (link goes to the 1994 vintage) that we opened yesterday to taste with the duck teaser. Omiofriggin’dio. So fabulous.