Duck breast and endive salad with raspberries

Weekday cooking can easily become a bit repetitive; the same old tomato pasta, the same old jacket potato. This week I said to my mum that I would cook something new each day, all recipes coming from the lovely recipe book: The Little Paris Kitchen (can you tell I'm still in denial over the fact that I have returned to England... it's the post-Provence blues.) The night that I cooked this particular recipe, my mum had returned home pretty late, tired and hungry. So I think you can imagine the reception "we're having salad" received. This reaction was heightened when I went on to say "yes I know it's just salad, but it's got duck, endives, raspberries, vinegar..." The look on her face said it all. Now my mum's a really good cook, and she is always up for trying new recipes... but even she thought this all sounded too bizarre. However, I can proudly proclaim that the earlier sneer turned to a beaming smile after the first mouthful (honestly!) so for any fellow doubters, I urge you to give it a try.

As always, I wanted to adapt this recipe a bit to make it my own, but I found this particularly challenging when the original recipe itself was a little out of my comfort zone: it's all well and good adding a bit of lemon zest to a sponge, but finding suitable additions to duck, endive AND raspberries was a bit tricky. I decided to resort to good old BBC Good Food, researching 'duck' to seek out some tried and tested combinations. Unsurprisingly, cherry and orange were pretty regular offenders. I searched on however and came across a recipe for duck with a maple and sherry vinegar dressing. Rachel Khoo's original version (in The Little Paris Kitchen) already contained sherry vinegar, so this didn't seem like too much of a diversion. Away from Good Food, I also came across a combination of duck and hazelnuts - something else which caught my fancy. Now I fear some of you may be turning up your noses to this already, and I will confess that I initially did the same. However, in my humble opinion, it genuinely does work: the hazelnuts add a great texture and the maple and vinegar balance out beautifully and compliment the gamey flavour of the duck.

Ingredients:
Serves 2
1 duck breast/duck breast strips if whole breasts are unavailable (as in my case)
2 small red endives
A small handful of raspberries
About 10 hazelnuts
1 1/2 tbsp. maple syrup
1 1/2 tbsp. sherry vinegar
1 tbsp. olive oil (ideally extra virgin) plus a little bit of standard oil for frying

Method:

• Toast hazelnuts and set aside.
• Mix together maple syrup, sherry vinegar and oil.
• Arrange the endive leaves on your plates.
• Add a little oil to a frying pan and heat until really hot.
• Add the duck breast whole (skin side down first), or strips, and cook until cooked to your preference. I used duck breast strips and these cooked in a couple of minutes flat, keeping a lightly pink middle.
• Add the duck to your plates, scatter over the raspberries and hazelnuts and drizzle over the dressing.