Duck with Orange Sauce

Why does gastrique sauce have to be so damn impossible to do? Forget that (as Annabelle pointed out) gastrique sounds totally unappetizing, it's also damn near impossible to get right. Mine, apparently had the right taste, but I can't seem to get the consistency of it right. Bah. I give up on it. I made a really good gastrique last session, but asking us to deglaze with jellied Grand Marnier? That is just wrong.

Why is the Grand Marnier jelly? Because chefs are notorious for having drinking problems, so all of our hard liquor is jelly (it gloops out of the bottle) and all our wine is salted. This might just be me, but if I wanted to get drunk bad enough I would likely shoot some of that jellied booze back like I was at a Stag and Doe. It makes controlling your salt in your sauce hard because you can't separate sodium from wine flavour. So you want to add more wine to have that flavour, but then you end up oversalting the sauce. I say let them drink and let their fates befall them. And let me deglaze my caramel for my gastrique with liquid Grand Marnier.

But anyway, we just served that annoying sauce on the side of this duck breast. What the point of the exercise was I'm not sure. They also made us sear foie gras, which I found to be annoying because my pan wasn't hot enough and it didn't get enough colour. My pan was smoking, but apparently it has to be on the verge of bursting into flames before foie gras will sear and get colour and not just melt. The grape sauce we had to make for the foie gras turned out really well for me, but I was bitter about having to peel the grapes. I mean, do the French not have good strong teeth? The skin is part of the grape. Just chew it.