It wasn’t a great meal, but it was pretty good, and it included 2 elements never before seen on these pages: Something called ‘duck rillettes sausage’ (the farm describes it as ‘shredded duck confit sausage’) and a balsamic dried cherry thyme compote.

Rather than pan-grilling the sausage, I should probably have fried the links in a heavy pan, at a lower flame. They were uncooked, but they weren’t pork, so I probably left them on the grill pan too long, compromising a full appreciation of the flavors, which included vegetables and spices.

• four duck rillettes sausages (17 ounces) from Hudson Valley Duck Farm, pan-grilled for a few minutes
• served with 2 condiments: a thick compote made by heating together an ounce of balsamic vinegar, and ounce of dried cherries, an ounce of turbinado sugar, and a sprig of thyme from Eataly, reduced until the cherries were plump and the liquid syrupy; and a Maille ‘Old Style’ whole-grain Dijon mustard, which arrived on the plate at the other end of the sausages in the image at the top, only after the photo was taken.
• wild cress from Lani’s Farm, dressed with Farnkies olive oil, a drizzle of Whoile Foods organic lemon, Maldon salt, and freshly-ground black pepper

There were also some over-wintered carrots, and it was now early spring. I had purchased them almost 2 weeks earlier, in fact; they had been waiting in the crisper. All of which meant that it was pretty remarkable that they were so tasty last night.

• Kyoto red carrots from Norwich Meadows Farm, well scrubbed and trimmed, dried, cut into bite-size pieces, tossed inside a bowl with a little Portuguese olive oil, sea salt, freshly-ground black pepper, plus one and a half teaspoons of crushed Sicilian fennel seed, placed, not touching, on a large ceramic Pampered Chef oven pan, roasted at 425º for half an hour, or until tender, arranged on the plates and garnished with micro kohlrabi from scissored chives from Phillips Farms [now, after seeing their color after cooking, we can understand why I didn’t want to serve these carrots with the salmon the other night]
• the wine was an Italian (Puglia) red, Cantele Salice Salentino Riserva 2014, from Garnet Wines
• the music was the second act of Mozart’s 1791 Singspiel (a proto-musical), ‘Die Zauberflöte, a 1996 recording by  John Eliot Gardner leading the Monteverdi Choir, and the English Baroque Soloists, with Harry Peeters, Cyndia Sieden, Christiane Oelze, Michael Schade, Gerald Finley, Constanze Backes, Detlef Roth, Ewe Peper, Susan Roberts, Carola Guba, Maria Jonas, Andreas Dieterich, Jan Andreas