Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Also seared duck breast

I've spent the greater portion of the past two =days= cleaning and organizing stuff.  Phew!  I don't even remember how I started down this path anymore, it was like one little thing where I was like "oh well, also trash day is coming up so I should also probably take care of this other thing that I've been meaning to and -- oh, while I'm at it, I guess I could really go through this other thing and ..." and before I knew it I was embarking on a total rehaul of boxes, drawers, and everything.

I'm very pleased at what I've been able to accomplish so far though!  I've sent a bunch of things off to recycling / landfill (related: I've also realized I'm not nearly as savvy as I should be on recycling and trash practices, so I'm starting to try to learn my way around that), marked other things for donating or giving away, moved a bunch of things around, and tried to declutter as well as reorganize so things make more sense.  No huge changes; all the furniture is still in the same place after all, but for example I had this stack of huge boxes and junk in the corner of my office before; all of that has either gotten thrown away, packed into sensible boxes in the back of my bedroom closet, or in storage in the garage where it isn't cluttering an actual room that I use.  I tackled quite a number of things including but not limited to:
- Redoing drawers in my office.  They're much better organized now.  Also my stationary and letter sets are much easier to get at without digging through piles of it).
- Shuffling some things around in my dresser drawers and rethinking how I fold some of my clothes.  When clothing and accessories are not easily accessible it becomes easy to just forget they exist and never make use of them, so I tried to push all of the "only use once in a while" winter gear and stuff way to the back, and moved all my hairties and such from my office to my bedroom dresser -- after all I should think about those as I am getting dressed along with the rest of my outfit.
- Repacked my box of boxes (not a big deal, it was already pretty ok, but still), and more importantly, completely redid the huge "bag of bags" that I use to keep all of my cute sanrio bags in (for gifting).  It's now a "box of bags", and they're roughly sorted by size so I can flip through and get a bag of the appropriate size instead of just trying to dig through a whole mess.  I also put my bubble mailers in the same box, yay!
- Coalesced some of my Magic: the Gathering stuff.  I have a ton of unopened boosters that are still nice to have, as well as a cube and a battle box, etc, but they're all sort of in one place instead of three different places, and I've thrown out a bunch of the packaging material and boxes and such that aren't really useful to me at all.
- Washed the bedsheets...dusted the floors...etc.
- Trying to air out a bunch of the scarves that unfortunately inherited the smell of a candle that they were packed together with while moving a long time ago.

In general there was a lot of switching from "big pile of things stacked on top of each other" to "horizontal stack of things so I can flip through and access any individual thing easily".

One thing I might still try is rotating the couch 90 degrees (same corner) as that might actually make the office feel a bit more opened up.  I'll have to see how it feels though.

I'm still not really done; I have a whole pile of charms and decorations that I took off of old bags (in addition to ones that I just have had the whole time) and would like to find a way to display them sensibly.  My office has a nice gridded display bookcase thing but it's sort of a big mess right now, so I will be looking to reshuffle that around and hopefully turn it back into a nice display.  I'm also entertaining the idea using some command hooks to hang charms on, but we'll see about that.

Anyways, I haven't really been accomplishing much else these past couple of days, but on the flipside I feel really productive and like I'm doing really satisfying work.  I feel great about myself for taking care of all of this stuff.  It's not just the cleaning and organization either; I'm also trying to work at better practices for other things, for example I'm trying to get the hang of using a kitchen towel while I'm working in the kitchen instead of always relying on the sink and/or paper towels.  I'm still trying to wrap my head around a workflow that works for that, but I'm sure once I figure it out (?) it will make things go a lot more smoothly.

Speaking of cooking, I tried making seared duck breast tonight!



I don't often do food blogging, but hey, why not?

Got inspired to try cooking duck breast after having it at Tanto (a tasty Japanese restaurant), and followed some of the basic directions from the Serious Eats writeup of searing duck breast.  It turned out relatively well!  This is my first time ever working with duck meat, but I think it seemed to be very forgiving in terms of timing because it has so much insulation on the skin/fat side.  You can see in the photo I managed to get a pretty nice level of doneness almost all the way throughout, which was nice (of course, also used a thermometer to help me estimate).

I didn't take a photo of it, but I knew that there would be a ton of rendered duck fat from the cooking, so planning for that I made some microwaved mashed potatoes with mushroom and just poured the duck fat all over it so it would soak into the potatoes for extra flavor.  That worked out, though I think there was even TOO much fat really for that purpose.  It also made for an extremely heavy meal, which is not necessarily a bad thing inherently, but I think I would have preferred something closer to the Tanto style where they serve it over a nice salad with thin (sweet) onion slices and daikon sprouts and other veggies.

The duck breast felt kind of like a steak; it was an interesting combination of traits between chicken and beef.  It did end up being a little chewy; I think two things I would change next time are to try to salt in advance next time (I'm assuming that duck meat, like other meats, will go through some tenderization via dry brining), as well slice much more thinly.

I think I could be a little less heavy-handed on the salt next time, it didn't seem super salty at the time but afterwards I'm feeling it a little bit.  For a long time I used fine-grained table salt out of a salt shaker but have since switched to measuring out coarse-grained salt by pinching it with my fingers, which is easier to see visually but I still need to calibrate downwards on the amount of salt that I need to use.

You can see in the photo I made a pan sauce by deglazing my stainless steel pan with a bit of sake and then adding in some mirin and soy sauce and sugar -- this seemed to be a pretty common combination of ingredients for sauce to go with duck breast when I looked up Japanese recipes (this combination is also just common in Japanese cooking in general).  It worked out alright, though I personally wasn't ecstatic about it.  I did have some wasabi in the fridge (not authentic wasabi, but the green stuff that we make do with in the states) which I remember from Tanto going super well with the dish; the same was true here.  Looking it up afterwards, these sorts of Tataki (seared meat/fish) dishes are often served with a ponzu sauce, so I'll probably try that next time.  I don't think it's worth keeping yet =another= sauce container in the fridge so I'll probably just mix my own with soy sauce and some citrus juice.

I've actually been into Japanese style salads recently, like with onion slices and daikon sprouts and such, so perhaps at some point I'll try to figure out how to put one of those together (which...honestly seems pretty simple, just figure out the dressing and then put veggies together).

Anyways, pretty good experiment, all things considered.  I ended up cooking two duck breasts (came in a pack of two) which of course is way too much to expect one human being to eat for a meal so I have another duck breast which I guess I can eat tomorrow for lunch if it's still good.  Tomorrow night I actually have a quite fancy dinner outing courtesy of my family so that should be much more exciting than this, haha.

For those of you who are still looking for more foodie stuff to entertain yourself with, I've also been going back to making this Brie and Nutella Grilled Cheese sandwich recently as I realized I haven't had nutella in a long time (and nutella is delicious).