Confit de Canard et Pommes de Terre sautées à la Graisse de Canard

A Southwest French classic, this Duck Confit with Potatoes Sautéed in Duck Fat (à la salardaise). And unless you actually make your Duck Confit yourself (my FIL gave us his recipe for Confit de Poule/Hen Confit before he went to Heaven, so I'm just waiting for the right moment to try it out - I'll be back), it's a simple dish to heat up and serve - only it does take some experience to heat it up right and get the potatoes done to perfection.

The recipe for the potatoes can be found in one of my older posts : http://beaulotus.blogspot.com/2006/05/hubbys-40th-birthday-bash.html

Before we tucked into the dish, we had a glass or 2 of sweet white wine with a few Foie Gras toasts. This bottle of Sainte-Croix-du-Mont 2002 Domaine de Baure was actually one of my recent purchases. Yes, I've widened my purchasing repertoire and have in the past 2 years included alcohol in the things I buy. In fact, armed with my Hachette or Robert Parker, or just using the Internet, I have bought dozens of bottles of wines (Bordeaux, Bourgogne, Sauternes, Monbazillac, Sainte-Croix-du-Mont etc etc). I buy in wine shops, in the supermarket, on the Internet, in wine fairs, from the wine makers themselves...And I usually pay anything between 9 and 35 Euros for each bottle. Between France and Germany, we now have more than 200 bottles of wine in our cellars.

The thing is that I honestly prefer tea to wine. But when in France do as the French do, and since we usually have to serve wine with our meals, I've decided to do the smart thing and build up our own cellar. This is an investment (as good wines have to be sourced, aged etc), a good way to assure the quality and control the price of our wines, et surtout to never run dry! God forbid (shudders)...