Soy un perdedor, I'm a loser, baby

How appropriate for the Beck song "Loser" to come on the radio just as I was accelerating onto eastbound 80. 'Cause that's totally the way I was feeling after class today. It was individual competition, entrée day, and I didn't give Chef my best work.

It all started out calmly enough. I had one hour and 15 minutes to prepare an entrée with starch and vegetable. My assignment was "duck breast, Thai," and I immediately wrote down the taste profile: sweet, savory, hot and sour. I knew I wanted to make mashed potatoes. Don't ask me why. I thought about a slaw made with cabbage salad. I collected a bunch of ingredients and started on the potatoes. Easy enough to peel and chop them, then place them in a pan of water on the stove.

The duck breast needed a little trimming, then I cut slits in the fat layer and made a marinade of tamarind juice, fish sauce, lemon grass, galangal, red chili flakes, and brown sugar. I plopped the duck in the sauce and moved on to the salad.

Surprisingly, we had no cabbage -- I was hoping for the soft, lacy napa cabbage -- so I peeled a japanese cucumber, sliced a red onion, minced a red jalapeno, and dressed it all in rice vinegar, sesame oil, salt and pepper. I left that to pickle a bit.

I wanted my potatoes to be somewhat Thai flavored, so I roasted some red and green jalapenos, then peeled and minced them. I added a crushed chunk of lemongrass to some cream and put that on the stove to warm up. I started the duck on a sauté pan over low heat, skin side down. The skin side needs to cook slowly over medium heat so that most of the fat under the skin renders out. After the skin was nicely browned, I put the duck in the oven to finish cooking. My biggest concern was that it would be under- or over-cooked.

I poured out most of the duck fat from the sauté pan and started a sauce, deglazing the pan with tamarind juice and adding some of the marinade. As it was cooking, I added chopped mango.

With everything in place and about 15 minutes to spare, I cleaned up my area a bit and did some dishes. Then I did the final prep and that's when everything just sort of caved in.

Not that it was bad, mind you. But it wasn't good. I drained the potatoes, added some butter, and began mashing them with a spoon. I poured cream in -- whoa, too much -- and rushed over to the sink to pour off as much liquid as I could. I pushed the potatoes through a sieve and flavored them with the minced peppers and salt, but they were way softer than I'd planned. I added some fresh mango and butter to the sauce, and let it cook down while I sliced the duck, which (big sigh) was perfectly cooked. I spread some sauce on my warmed plate, then realized that I should have placed it closer to the center of the dish. But time was ticking; I spooned on the potatoes, arranged the sliced duck, and added a little cucumber salad, and took it to Chef Rhoda for evaluation.She took one look at it and said, "This plate is all lopsided." She didn't like the fresh vegetables; she'd rather have seen something cooked. The potatoes were too soft and "didn't taste like anything," and the mangoes in the sauce were overripe or overcooked -- too squishy, at any rate. "A waste of good fruit," in fact. She tasted the duck and said, "This is cooked perfectly." After a couple of bites, she used her two plastic utensils to rearrange the food in a semblance of an acceptable presentation. "You should use a mold for the potatoes -- firm potatoes -- here" as she scooted them across the plate, "and fan the duck up like this." All in all, I received 24 of 30 points. The usual suspects hit the high 20s and I'm bummed.

But you gotta get right back on the horse, right? I picked up a mango and a duck breast on the way home from class, and I'll cook it again, for dinner.

"I’m a driver, I’m a winner; things are gonna change I can feel it..." - Beck