Duck breast with Port wine

Another recipe from Nicolle Meyer and Amanda Smith's 'Paris in a basket: markets, the food and the people'.
Good, filling, tasty, not as difficult as I was expecting.

Serves: 2 persons.

Ingredients:

• 40g raisins
• 125ml Port wine
• 2 breasts of duck
• 1 Golden apple
• Salt & pepper to taste

Method:

1. Soak the raisins in the Port Wine for 10 minutes. Or leave them in the Port like I did, until they are needed!
   
2. Dry the breasts and make diagonal incisions on the skin.
   
3. Heat up a frying pan and dry fry the duck breasts, skin side down first for 8 min and then the other side for another 1 min. Remove the excess of fat from the frying pan to a small recipient. I actually left it for longer as I was worried it may not be cooked enough. I left both sides until they were golden, which I think was a bit longer than the recipe called for. In the end the breasts were perfectly pink in the middle.
   
   
   
   
4. Place the breasts on a plate, salt & pepper to taste and reserve.
5. Core an apple and cut into 8 fine rings. This is where I went wrong! I started quartering the apple before reading the recipe properly...
6. Fry the apple rings in the frying pan with the duck fat, 30 seconds each side. Reserve.
   
   
   
   
7. Deglaze the pan with a spoon of duck fat and half of the Port wine. This means you add the ingredients to the pan and then rub the bottom with a wooden or silicone spoon to remove all the sticky bits.
8. Increase the heat and when boiling add the raisins and the remaining Port wine. Reduce the heat and let it cook for a few minutes. Here I reduced the Port wine by half.
   
   
   
   
9. Cut the duck breasts in slices of 0.5cm. Or there about...
10. Plate the apple rings first (4 in each plate), the duck on top and the sauce with the raisins over both. Here is where I realised why the apple needs to be cut into rings: the duck doesn't stay on top of the quarters!!
11. Serve with potato mash or polenta. I chose mash potato and raw carrots.