When we told friends about our plans to spend several days in Nebraska on our recent road trip, everyone told us to be prepared to eat a lot of beef. Nobody mentioned duck. The first night, I ate a duck leg in red wine that inspired this week’s recipe.

It was at La Buvette, a comfortable French wine bar, cafe and market in Omaha’s charming Old Market district. You seat yourself at one of a handful of tables, inside or on the broad sidewalk. The brick walls are lined with an impressive selection of bottles of wine for sale. So if you like what you’re drinking with dinner, you can take some with you—at retail prices, no steep restaurant markup. You can also buy cheeses, deli meats and other treats at the market counter. The duck was sublime, reminding me why we cook it so much here at Blue Kitchen.

Lunch the next day was at Saigon Surface, a sleek Vietnamese restaurant downtown. Marion and I shared two steaming bowls of pho, one of them featuring slices of duck in a fragrant broth. That evening, after briefly considering a couple of other spots, we said “who are we kidding” and went back to La Buvette. I would have eaten the duck leg again if they’d had it that night. They didn’t. They did have a duck breast, so I ordered that. Also delicious. But I already knew I wanted to do something with duck legs and red wine when we got home.

Some home cooks find duck daunting, but it’s really pretty easy if you remember one thing: duck breasts cook quickly, legs take longer. Admittedly, that makes cooking a whole duck slightly more complicated, but as Marion has demonstrated here, that’s fairly straightforward too.

For this recipe, the duck legs braise in the oven for about two hours after first browning them on the stovetop. I wanted the wine sauce to make it taste as though the whole thing had cooked even longer, so I reduced the wine by half first. I can’t even remember what celebrity chef I learned this trick from, but it’s a good one.