TChen Makes Thanksgiving... duck?!

Hey everyone! I hope y'all had a lovely Thanksgiving! Please share with me what you ate!

So my Thanksgiving was a bit... nontraditional. We did what we like to a call an "Asian Thanksgiving." I mean, after all, didn't the native Americans initially immigrate from Asia? (But actually, we were just too lazy to make a turkey/didn't have enough people to eat a turkey/ couldn't imagine eating turkey leftovers for the rest of the year.)

What did we make then? Well we had a Chinese hot pot and a Chinese roast duck! The hot pot used chicken broth as a base and we added lots of beef, shrimp, abalone, veggies, and noodles! The duck was prepared over 2 days, by the one and only, me.

sorry! so foggy!

can you spot my phone?

 So sorry guys! My phone was a bit hazy for a few of the pics, but I hope you were able to get a good idea of what I made!

Now for the recipe... I didn't really follow a specific recipe, nor did I measure anything out. It was more like a squeeze of hoisin sauce here, a pinch of five spice powder there, and few oranges in the cavity, and bam! Sounds simple, right? Well it really was quite simple. However, there are two tricks. First, you should separate the skin from the meat using your fingers if you cannot inflate it with a air syringe pump. Next, you should hang and dry out your duck before you cook it. We dried out the skin for at least 24 hours so that the skin almost became paper thin. This is more of a trick for Peking duck, rather than roast duck, but I noticed that the skin wasn't so fatty in the end and was quite crispy! I figured, why not combine the best of these two recipes to make the ultimate duck!

And boy, was it an ultimate duck. It was juicy and had the slightest hint of oranges. Delicious.

Let me know if you really want a full recipe and I can see what I can do!