Anyone for duck?

The meals around here are nothing if not predictible, which is actually a good thing, at least from my point of view as someone who does not like surpises especially of the culinary sort. Breakfast is always an egg (usually hard boiled, occasionally scrambled), a hot bowl of milk and some bread. Mrs. Z gets a kick out of it when I break the egg apart and put it between the bread to make a sandwhich of sorts. And dinner has settled into a fairly constant number of dishes that get rotated. You can tell they have taken great care to see the dishes that I like and then generally serve some subset of those. So there is usually some form of tofu, a lot of vegetables, e.g. eggplant, tomatoes, squash and a bowl of rice. And not a lot of meat. So it is a pretty healthy if predicatble diet.

Today, however, we had something new, and quite a production was made of it. "Beijing kaoya" or Peking roast duck. There was a bowl with duck meat in it, another bowl with some vegetables and another with what could be descriped as mini tortillas. Mr. Z took great care to show me how to combine the tortilla (o.k. it wasn't a tortilla, but I did not catch the name of what it was called) the meat and the vegetable and finally how to dip it in the sauce.

It was delicious, one of my favorite meals. But the best was saved for last, and Mrs. Z brought out the bowl with the baked duck head in it and said this was the best part and offered it to me. I told her I was full and she proceeded to pick apart the duck head for what she said was the tenderest meat and I took her word for it. She went on to explain that it is better than rabbit head, which is another delicacy, because with rabbit head there is no meat and you must just suck it for the flavor.

On a similar not, the big grocery stores here sell baked chickens just like the big grocery stores in America--except that the chicken still has its little head baked on it and there is in the store all cooked and ready to go and just staring at you with that dead baked head. In a way I prefer this way of doing things to the American way. Here at least you know you are eating something that once lived and breathed and in America we hide that fact by having something in the store that looks nothing like a living creature. So there is a level of honesty here I can appreciate. There also may be an good argument for vegetarianism, but that is another story.