This past Sunday, the birds were sweetly chirping, blossoms scented the oddly warm April air, and my grill intoned its siren song. High time I fetched that propane refill and fired up.

But I had a problem: A duck in my freezer was burning a hole in my conscience. In a fit of profligacy, I’d purchased it from D’Artagnan back in the fall, when I’d had to supplement the last of the Moore Farm ducks I’d bought that summer for an autumn feast I was planning. Given D’Artagnan’s shipping charges, I felt I should look beyond that immediate meal and lay in some stores. But I was guilty of mismanagement. Here it was nearly six months later, and one of those long-ago ducks still lurked in my freezer, having recently been threatened—and for the second time in months no less—by a fridge malfunction that could have rendered it a tragic loss. To let the situation go on any longer would really be, I felt, to tempt fate. After all, if I’d committed the food-mile crime, I should at least do the cooking time (and reap some tasty rewards in the bargain).

So I set out to cook my duck. Still, the sun was shining, and this feeling of culinary responsibility could only take me so far. Something on the order of my favorite Kylie Kwong recipe for Crispy Duck in Blood Plum sauce (http://www.abc.net.au/kyliekwong/recipes/s952372.htm) or, worse, the multi-step rigors of Peking-style duck was not going to happen. (Did I mention I was having an Asian hankering?) And who could stand for oven roasting at a high temp on such a balmy day? Nor was I going to risk engulfing my precious duck in barbecue flames, thanks to some inadvertent fat-dripping fiasco!

No, I would cook it in the Taiwanese style, braised in beer. For as we know, after some expeditious browning, and a quick addition of aromatics and liquids that are brought to a boil on the stove top, braises can go happily untended in the oven, yielding a succulent long-term reward that far outstrips the minimal initial investment. Given the weather, and the allure of the grill, it would likely be my last braise of the season.

To enjoy the same advantage yourself, follow the instructions from this nice lady, “Yeqiang,” on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPrKf8T5aRE . If you can get past her long disquisition on her Le Creuset and dutch ovens generally, and realize that when she says “braise,” she actually means “brown,” you’ll be sitting pretty. I also felt a little squeamish cooking the duck at only 200 degrees F, as she directs. So I preheated the oven to 350, then turned it down to 325 when I put in the covered pot. I also like to add more scallions than she calls for in the final stage of uncovered cooking.

This dish pairs wonderfully with jasmin rice and some baby bok choy, sautéed, then steamed until they go just tender and silky in a splash of water or broth and Shao Xing cooking wine (regular cooking sherry will do), then finished with a few tablespoons of high-quality oyster sauce to taste (eschew the stuff at your supermarket and get Lee Kum Kee’s “premium” sauce, sporting people in the foreground before a body of water, at an Asian store—Try Green Onion, Far East, or Am-Ko her in C-U). Because this was a duck with provenance, I gilded the bok choy with some local Mill Creek mushrooms (oyster and shitake) that I’d sautéed with garlic and ginger until they’d gone almost crisp. And, in an at-once decadent and frugal hous-frau touch, I made crackling out of the neck flap I’d cut from the duck and crumbled it over the whole veggie lot.

Enjoyed al fresco, it was a meal most worthy of my long-deferred D’Artagnan duck, and I still had plenty of time to play outside with the kids. Priceless.

Incidentally, I went in quest of Taiwanese Beer Duck thanks to an earlier search for a soup dumpling recipe. These dumplings, xia long bao, magically contain the broth on the inside. The secret is a gelée made of meat broth (aspic). Traditionally, this is made with agar agar, a seaweed/red algae derivative that has the advantage of not melting at room temp, which gelatin can do under certain warmish circumstances. The broth-gel melts when you steam the dumplings, and voilà, soup IN your dumpling. Anyhow, The Cooking of Joy (http://the-cooking-of-joy.blogspot.com/2009/01/xiao-long-bao-steamed-soup-dumplings.html) mentioned that the sauce from Joy’s mother’s (secret-recipe) Duck in Beer had nicely gelatinized after overnight storage, and Joy had thus decided to use it to make soup dumplings. Well, after the dish was dangled before me, I had to have a recipe for that duck, and that’s what led me to Yeqiang’s version on YouTube. I can attest that while xia long bao are far more labor intensive than the above low-fuss braise, if you have the time, they are very much worth the effort. (Bon Appetit has a good tutorial: http://www.bonappetit.com/tipstools/slideshows/2009/04/howto_make_soup_dumplings#slide=1.)

Just maybe not on an atypically gorgeous April day after an eternally snowy winter.