Waterfowling is done for the year and what better way to recover from a long season than to host a duck feast for my fellow fowling friends? Holly and I invited our compadres who either share our obsession with chasing web-footed birds or who are planning to acquire this particular neurosis in the near future. I wanted to serve them something special, so I took Iron Chef as my inspiration and made it “Battle Duck.” Seven courses, five duck dishes. No, I did not do duck ice cream. Here’s the rundown:

• A Mallard Tasting. (More on this in a bit)
• Duck liver ravioli in chestnut flour pasta, served with a sauce of balsamic vinegar and duck fat.
• Waterfowl consomme.
• Polish style duck sausage, served over sauerkraut with caraway seeds and homemade saba mustard.
• Teal grilled over almond wood.
• A mixed green salad dressed with olive oil and Meyer lemon juice.
• Homemade vanilla ice cream with Spanish almond cookies.

We started with what just might be the world’s first-ever “mallard tasting.” You’ve heard of wine tastings where you try the same vintage of the same varietal from different parts of the world? Well, we did this with mallards.

I provided a duck shot in the rice fields of the Sacramento Valley, our friend Evan (who, sadly, could not make the dinner) gave us an acorn-eating bird from the Amador County foothills, Holly provided her first-ever mallard, which she’d downed in Merced County marshes known as the Grasslands, while our friend Pete (about whom I’ve written recently) brought with him a mallard that had lived in the Delta, the West Coast’s largest estuary.

Four birds, four regions, four very different diets. Why mallards? They are big, and unlike many other ducks they are opportunists, so will eat whatever they have available. All I did was sear them in duck fat and salt them with fleur de sel. All were delicious, but when it came down to the judging Holly’s Grasslands mallard was the clear favorite, followed by my rice mallard. My own favorite was the acorn mallard because it was deeper and stronger in flavor than the rest.

But check this out: The Delta mallard, which had eaten lots of corn, was rated the poorest (remember all were tasty, so this is a relative index) by four of us. Anyone who has read Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” knows that “corn-fed” isn’t synonymous with the kind of rich flavor we all seek in meat. To see it played out so starkly in our little test was eye-opening.

After that, the duck dishes came hard and fast. Tough to say which was my favorite, although my own little triumph was to get such good reviews from the duck liver ravioli.

Liver isn’t something lots of people will eat willingly, and wild duck liver is probably even less likely to tickle the interest of the offally challenged. But Mario Batali saved me. I riffed off Batali’s duck liver ravioli dish in his Babbo Cookbook, although I skipped the foie gras Mario uses and added oregano and more duck fat. I also used chestnut flour in the pasta, which I think matches perfectly with duck.

All in all, a good time – and a good chance to highlight how much you can do with waterfowl. Nothing was wasted in this feast, from innards to bones to leg meat. And for those of you who don’t hunt, everything I did could be done with domestic ducks.

If you are interested in trying these dishes, here is the recipe for the duck liver ravioli, and here is the recipe for the Polish duck sausage. I will do a special post on making top-quality duck broth soon, and I’ve already posted on how to make a proper salad. If you give these recipes a whirl, let me know how you like them, or if you have any suggestions.