I have Minnesota heritage, so when it comes to casseroles, hotdishes, and potatoes, I have natural instincts.  Often this takes the form of adding cheese.  On the flip side, though, I’ve never had much luck with cooking meat.  I can fake it with dishes involving ground beef and chicken, but now I feel the time has come to try grander things.

First, prepare the squash, as it  takes the longest time to bake.  I find that half an acorn squash per person is about all I can take, even though it’s delicious.

Using a sharp knife, and if you have the equipment, a rubber mallet, split an acorn squash in half from stem to tip.  Using a spoon, scoop and scrape out the seeds and stringy sections. For best results, you’ll now want to perforate the squash flesh in some way (although not the skin) – use a fork to poke some holes or a knife to make a few slits.  Then, brush half a teaspoon of melted butter over the flesh of each half, and drop a tablespoon of brown sugar in the hollow of each.  Place the halves cut-side up in a baking dish or tray with a quarter inch of standing water (to prevent burning the skin), and bake at 400 for an hour and a quarter.  Undercooked squash is not terribly tasty so err on the side of overcooking.

Cooking the rice is left as an exercise to the reader.  Or the reader’s rice cooker.

Now to the duck.  Use a glass dish (my hand-me-down Corningware seems to be working fine) for which you have a lid.  Grease the dish, and spread about a quarter cup of orange marmalade on the bottom.  Place your duck (in my case, a large duck breast from the corner butcher) on the marmalade.  I’m new at cooking duck, but I think it best to place the skin-side up, and it’s customary to cook duck with the skin on (in case you were wondering).  In order to help some of the fat run off, pierce the skin in many places but try not to pulverize the meat underneath.  Top the breast with more marmalade, sliced onions, minced garlic, and sliced oranges.  Bake at 475 for fifteeen minutes with the lid on, and then (to facilitate crisping the skin) remove the lid and bake until it reaches your desired level of “done”.  Apparently duck may be served rarer than other poultry, but for my first attempt, I went for at least 165 degrees – maybe another fifteen minutes.

And now, the verdict:

I had a logistical issue with timing the squash and the duck at the same time but while cooking  at different temperatures, so despite my own advice I undercooked the squash because I once I turned it up to 475 for the duck I had a problem estimating when the squash was finished.  As if to karmically compensate for this, the duck turned out to be overcooked.  I believe this was operator error on reading the thermometer…  In any event, it looked good, and the orange and onion was a fantastic combination, but it would be better next time to have two ovens and an assistant who can work a thermometer.