What Else Floats in Water?

A duck.

I bought an oven a couple of weeks ago. I'm sure I told you about that. It's one of them new-fangled convection ovens with a rotisserie attachment. Fancy. Well, after a, er, short day of grading, I decided it was time to try out the rotisserie. And, since I live in Beijing, and the weather has turned chilly, what better meat to roast than a duck.

Off I trundled to the store where I bought a half a duck earlier. And... there they were. Whole ducks. I had expected to see them with the head on. That's how most birds are sold in this town. But...

As I looked closer, it appeared that the WHOLE duck was there. There appear to be no slits in the duck at all. That means no nice, neat package of giblets stuffed inside a clean cavity. Not even a mostly clean cavity with just a few congealed blood bits. Oh, no. That I can handle. I mean a WHOLE duck. Head. Feet. Entrails. All of it. In a neat package of, well, duck skin. 

Glorious, roasted, crispy duck skin.

So that was it. It was a moment of truth. Would I buy the duck? Would I face up to the most disgusting thing I've encountered so far or would I walk away and buy some nice bit of trimmed pork or something? I wanted duck. I wanted roast duck. I scanned the chickens. They looked anemic and scrawny -- and the purple ones just look evil. I've tried to pick meat off of a whole chicken, and it's just not possible. And the ducks looked kind of scrawny, too. The half ducks weighed almost as much as the whole ducks! Would I be paying for too much bone if I bought a whole duck? But you can't really put a half a duck on a spit. (Fowl, it seems, are built rather like the people -- thin. What can I say: no one has any breasts.)

Choices! Indecision.

Well, I came here for something different and I didn't want to roast a chicken, I wanted to roast a duck. So, I picked up Donald and put him in the basket. Of course, poor Don was frozen, so there wasn't anyway I'd be cooking him up tonight.

To hedge my bets, I walked over to the pork counter and picked up a tenderloin (or something that appeared to be a tenderloin). (I cooked it up with some veggies a la Murley, and it was quite tasty.)

As I walked out the store, I wondered if I had made a horrible decision. Was I wasting money? Would chopping off a duck's head become too scary once I was home? Would I lose momentum since I'd have to wait for the darn thing to thaw? And then I considered the price... 20 yuan. That's... yeah, $3.00. It's Beijing, and while some meat can be pricey, duck is not one of those meats.

I stopped by a friend's place on the way back and she pointed out something that I hadn't thought of before. Not only might I find viscera inside, but perhaps unformed or partly formed eggs. (OK, maybe those are considered viscera, too, but I hadn't considered it before.) Ewwww! 

Don is sitting in the fridge right now, waiting. The plan is to go sightseeing tomorrow and then roast him on Saturday. That should let him thaw and give me some time to screw up the courage to decapitate and eviscerate him, literally. 

This is going to take more courage than anything else I've done, except maybe get on the plane.