Cooking A Goose

Yes, there were many jokes about our goose being cooked.

For Christmas I was going to roast a duck -- the perfect two-person holiday meal, with just enough delicious leftovers and rich stock. But the grocery store was out of ducks, so Lawson bought a goose instead. (A very expensive goose, as it turned out, so we felt extra-compelled to use every little bit of it.)

I proceeded to read everything I could about cooking geese. I decided to skip Joy's complicated two-day process for drying out the skin; decided to skip stuffing, too. I read about goose anatomy and goose grease. I'm glad for it, too, because it prepared me for some of the strangeness of goose.

The bird weighed 11 pounds. It was big, but just short enough to fit on a regular pan, unlike a turkey.

I took off the wing tips, rubbed the thing with salt, put it on a little folding metal poultry rack, set it in a deep pan and roasted it at 400 for 30 minutes, then 350 for a few hours. I flipped it from breast down to breast up halfway through the cooking time. I let the meat temp get pretty high since there was so much fat -- maybe 175 in the breast and somewhat more in the thigh.

Here were some of the strange things about goose:

Fat
An incredible amount of fat rendered off that goose. More than a quart and a half. It filled the deep roasting pan twice over, and there was still plenty left in the skin, not to mention the chunks I'd pulled from the cavity beforehand. Pre-cooking, the whole bird felt greasy and weird, like a hunk of sheep.

I have a lot of it left over in jars in the fridge.

It's great fat: snowy white and mild, really delicious. I roasted potatoes, beets, sweet potatoes and turnips in it to great effect. I intend to use it in tamale dough soon.

Goose Cracklins
The skin on the goose was still pretty blubbery, so I didn't serve it. Instead, I cut it into strips with scissors and put it in the roasting pan at about 290 degrees to render further, per Julia Child. Now I have a container of crispy goose cracklins. They are incredible.

Connective Tissue
Parts of the goose are clean and easy to eat. But parts -- particularly the back, wings and the part of the breast closest to the bone -- have a ton of connective tissue, almost like the muscle fibers are wrapped in casing. You know how you can sort of push meat off a chicken backwith your thuumbs? Not so with a goose. It meant some meat loss, as some of the bird wasn't good for regular plate eating. The dog got some gristly bits, and some went into stock.

Big Cavity
There's a lot of space inside a goose. I understand the desire to stuff it, but I think leaving it empty helped it cook better and render more fat.

Tight Joints
That's how Joy described them -- and they were right. I wish I had pictures of me grappling with that bird before roasting. It was bony, very bony, and I found out what "tight joints" meant when I tried to trim the enormous wing tips. Much twisting and crunching of bone ensued. The dog was impressed.

After roasting, the bird remained tight: prying a leg off was quite hard.

Good Stock
The carcass made lovely stock -- copious amounts of it, too. The enormous gizzards, the heart, and the two-foot neck helped, too.

Goose Liver is Not Foie Gras
The liver was just a regular liver, not fattened and yellow and mild like foie gras. It was tasty, though: I sauteed it and sliced it, then deglazed the pan with a few drops of Cointreau and poured that over it. It tasted like duck liver, fairly dark but not at all bitter and only faintly musky.

Amazing Gravy
I made a simple, classic gravy with pan drippings, red wine, black pepper and flour.

The Final Yield
Two big meals of roasted goose with root vegetables and gravy.
One goose liver appetizer.
Five quarts of stock.
One batch of goose tortilla soup (chicken tortilla soup with goose stock and goose meat).
One week of dog dinner supplementation with goose scraps.
One cup of goose cracklins.
Two pint jars of pure goose fat.

Fall Dinner

I've been either a lazy blogger or unimaginative cook this week. But tonight we're having a very suitably autumnal dinner at Grandma's. She is making a pork roast and applesauce, and I'm bringing roasted vegetables and a pear tart.

I used Anne Postic's recipe from the Free Times for the tart. My dough didn't hang together because I only had whole wheat flour, so I pressed it into a tart pan instead of making a free-form shape. It smells wonderful.

Nibbling while Rome Burns

As the stock market melted down further today, Grandma and I did our usual weekly shopping--same time, same day of the week--and the stores had only half the usual shoppers. Did they decide to stay at home and not buy food? Was it a citizen protest?

Ironically, lobster tails (Australian) and asparagus were on sale. I made this dish of roasted garlic, tomatoes, asparagus, and lobster with pasta:

1 head of garlic, trimmed and wrapped in foil

4 plum tomatoes, quartered and tossed with olive oil

1 pound asparagus, all tough stalks discarded, and cut in 2-inch lengths

Shrimp or lobster

Pasta for two, cooked and drained

Lemon juice

Fresh oregano and thyme

Salt and pepper

Heat oven to 450 degrees. Put in foil-wrapped garlic.

Ten minutes later, place tomatoes on baking sheet and add to oven. Roast 20 minutes without turning, until slightly black and shriveled.

Add asparagus to pan and roast for a further 10 minutes.

Add shrimp or lobster and roast for a few minutes until done.

Squeeze out garlic into a serving bowl. Mash with lemon juice, herbs, salt, and pepper. Mix in cooked pasta and roasted vegetables and shellfish. Season to taste.

***

We had this with fresh strawberries and dark chocolate. And martinis and sauvignon blanc. I can't shake a kind of doomsday feeling--like we should have had beans just in case.