Preparation Time: 5 mins Cooking Time: 20 mins Difficulty: 2/5 Weight Loss Score: 2/5FlavourSmash Flavours: Soy Sauce Thai Chilli Sauce White Wine Vinegar Worcester Sauce Wholegrain Mustard

Ingredients (for 2 people): 2 fresh duck breasts 2 Choy Sum About 15 Cherry tomatoes 2 bird eye chillis 200g blueberries 50g fresh root ginger 100g spring onions 3 tbspn cracked black pepper

Pan-fried duck breast is one of my favourite things in the world. The delicious succulent meat, when left slightly pink, has the most wonderful texture and moistness. This is certainly not something I would usually associate with any form of diet food but when care is taken not to add any extra fat or any complex carbohydrates then it is possible to create something that doesn’t pack on the pounds.

Duck is however, a very fatty meat, the skin holds a thick layer of fat to the flesh which is simply delicious. A lot of this fat, is released during cooking and can removed from the pan. Someone also told me that this fat isn’t as bad for you as pork or beef fat, since it’s been proven that in some areas of France, where people eat a lot of goose and duck fat, the rates of coronary heart disease is much lower than elsewhere. Well, I’ve just done a quick bit of research and found the following paper by Mary Enig PhD and Sally Fallon, ‘The Truth About Saturated Fats’

Here’s an excerpt:

As a final example, let us consider the French. Anyone who has eaten his way across France has observed that the French diet is just loaded with saturated fats in the form of butter, eggs, cheese, cream, liver, meats and rich patés. Yet the French have a lower rate of coronary heart disease than many other western countries. In the United States, 315 of every 100,000 middle-aged men die of heart attacks each year; in France the rate is 145 per 100,000. In the Gascony region, where goose and duck liver form a staple of the diet, this rate is a remarkably low 80 per 100,000.25 This phenomenon has recently gained international attention as the French Paradox.

In this case, I think there’s nothing wrong with a delicious Duck Breast from time to time, and if we make the rest of the dish incredibly healthy and tasty then we can still lose weight whilst having little indulgences like this.

Okay, get a pan to a medium-low heat, add the tiniest amount of oil and place the duck breasts in the pan skin down.

Whilst thats slowing sizzling away, prepare your vegetables for the stir-fry. Pak Choi, cherry tomatoes and spring onions have been used here. Separate the leaves from the pack choi, half the tomatoes and slice the onions up length-ways. Also get a nice chunk on ginger and chop it as finely as you can be bothered.

Stick them al in a hot wok with a little sesame oil and after a minute a spalsh a load of flavour into the pan. I’ve gone for Thai Chilli Sauce, Soy, Worcester and just a dash of wholegrain mustard.

Turn the duck over, you have to be careful not to burn the skin, the breasts tend to be quite thick. The skill in cooking them is making sure you have right temperature to just make sure the meat cooks through and the skin takes on a wonderfully crispy texture and turns a delicious golden brown

Once the duck is cooked, take it out of the pan to rest for 5-10 minutes. If you are really not sure if it is cooked correctly, slice it open and have a peak,  it will ruin the presentation a bit, but it’s better than sitting down to tuck into your deleicious breast only to find that the meat is completely raw inside.

I’d made the sauce for this dish a couple of days before hand, it’s dead easy. Get a pan, and whack in a box of blueberies, add some fruit juice (ideally some other super food juice: pomegranate, grape, acai) to just cover the berries and bring to the boil. Freshly mill a ton of black pepper into the mixture until you can start to taste its aromatic hotness over the sweetness of the fruit. It’ll take about 30 mins to cook through and boil down to the desired texture. You can then seive to make a smooth sauce, and serve as it is.

And thats it. Bring it all togther on a plate, slicing the duck and pouring the sauce all over it, with the stir-fry as your side.

This is was a taste sensation, it felt like a treat, but it was so full of super-food ingredients and so low in carbs that I was actually doing mself good and losing weight by enjoying eating so much.

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