Quack.

Lately I've been thinking about how I can spice up my Christmas dinner, I had a conversation (in great detail) with one of my coworkers about a very, very tasty Italian inspired meal.
Have you ever had duck? If not consider yourself lucky; duck is extremely easy to do badly. Duck can be greasy, tough, and generally overcooked by the average cook. Instead, a good duck should be medium-well, drained of most of the fat and deliciously tender. That's not easy, it involves scoring the skin just so, without cutting the meat, searing it at just the right temperature so that the duck doesn't burn before you've rendered most of the fat, and finally making sure that you cook it for just long enough.
Michael Smith has an excellent take on how to do duck, if you're interested.
Anyway, the thought was to cook duck for Christmas Dinner instead of turkey or any other fowl.
Duck isn't strictly Italian, but it'll do. Seasoning the duck with a little bit of salt and pepper and searing it off nicely will impart all the flavours you need, no additional spices or herbs required.
Once you've successfully rendered all of the fat out of a few duck breasts (rendering the fat really is the most important thing when cooking duck) the thought was that if you toasted some good rye and sourdough bread cubes in a small amount of the fat (SMALL AMOUNT, no one wants a mouthful of grease) and then added some mirepoix (finely diced onion, carrots, and celery) as well as some garlic, you would have a very tasty mixture. Throw in some Italian herbs, notably sage and a touch of oregano, and lastly a very small amount of diced stewed tomatoes, if you aren't using san marzano tomatoes I suggest you slap yourself, and you'd have a damn good panzenella salad.
Or at least that's what we were thinking. If I ever try it, I'll let you know.