I’m hosting a dinner on Saturday night. Now, despite the fact that this dinner is for my girlfriend, a coworker and his boyfriend, and an ex-coworker, all of whom are 1) awesome, 2) into food, 3) palatally adventurous, which should be a recipe for keywords like “casual,” “low key,” etc., I am already in full obsessive mode about it. And instead of obsessing privately, I figure, fuck, I have a food blog! So I can just obsess in public!

As mentioned, I’m almost totally eschewing the tried-and-true stick-with-what-you-do-best mantra. And rehearsing, and testing, and failing, and succeeding. But even this is complicated because I keep changing my mind about the menu; and not just the menu, but the belle of the ball (at least in theory), the, you know, last non-dessert course.

I’m pretty sure about the rest, though I reserve the right to panic on Friday night (or even Saturday morning) and pull a Rauschenbergian erasure on the whole thing. I’m pretty sure that the meal will start with a variation on the sidecar and leek tartare, followed by my take on Judy Rodger’s house-cured anchovies with nicoise olives, thinly sliced celery, and reggiano. I wanted to follow that with a springtime pasta, so I’m intending to make a stinging nettle tagliatelle and make a sugo, I think primarily with goat, that’s going to cook all day long. And at the very end I’m going to serve that goddamned bay leaf panna cotta, which will just scream bay leaf with every bite. Knock wood.

So, sound okay? Okay. But it’s the plate in between goat sugo and bay leaf panna cotta that I’ve gone back and forth about so many times. I decided that I wanted to do some kind of mixed grill, or low-rent-Michael-Mina rip off. At first I was going to try to work with my friend rabbit. I love rabbit, and I especially love rabbit cooked by Tuscans in Tuscany. Rabbit cooked by Brandon in the Mission is all right, but I kept getting the screaming night sweats about it not being all right enough. So, now, I’m pretty sure I’m going to present my friend duck.

As of the time of this post, I am not sure what I’ll do. I hope that it will involve the beautiful beluga lentils we bought at Rainbow Grocery this weekend, and I hope that it will involve sautéed arugula rabe. And I’m starting to have this perverse fantasy of making a duck liver pupusa. But there’s one thing I do know. Somewhere on that plate will be thin slices of duck breast cooked rare with a wine sauce.

Yesterday for supper I gave that a shot. This shot (of my shot) is my way of confessing that the breast was really medium rare, but which gave me a better sense of how to do it right Saturday. It was so simple, but (salivating blogger). I scored the skin of two breasts to make diamond patterns, seasoned them well, then sautéed them skin-side down over medium-high heat until the skin was brown and crisp, then turned the breasts and let them cook for four minutes. And that was it. This one will have another chance to shine, Saturday night. But its playmates are yet to be determined.