Duck, duck, goose!

Ok, this is a lousy excuse for a food blog but every now and then I've just got to try.  My wife got to thinking about the tradition of having a goose for Christmas dinner.  Neither of us has ever had a goose but that didn't stop her thinking....  You KNOW you are in for it when your partner gets some weird idea.  I've done it to her plenty of times and this time I knew it was going to happen to me.  Anyway, before Christmas the frozen goose was $64 and my lovely little tightwad wife wouldn't pay it.  However, the last time we were at the store they had three or four that had been thawed; not a popular item so the marked it down to $15.  Needless to say, we bought the goose.

Yesterday was to be the big goose cook.  She'd saved up FOUR recipes for goose!  Yep, she's got it bad.  Anyway we discussed the four and finally decided to try this one that was very simple; Goose with Peppercorns and Thyme.  She slaves away in the kitchen for what seemed like hours and finally tosses the goose into the oven.  The recipe said cook it for 2.5 hours but after about an hour and a half the temperature was saying the goose was done.  OK, we left it in for a little while longer but in the end pulled it out.  We tented it for a while then sliced it up.  I had really good intentions to take some photos but forgot until the thing was half-carved.  Oh well.  Here's what the goose looked like on the un-carved side.

And here is the result of my carving efforts.

The goose was really pretty good.  I don't ordinarily go for the dark meat on a chicken or whatever but it was nice if a bit fatty.  Carving was kind of different because while the leg is simple enough to find, the thigh is quite a bit higher and farther back than on a chicken.  The wing was easy enough to remove and the breast, while much smaller than that on a chicken, carved very nicely.  The only problem for us was that the skin was not at all crispy.  We've seen cooking show after show where people are looking for crispy skin.  We definitely had limp skin.  I suppose more cooking would have cooked out more fat and it would have gotten crispy.  Who knows?  We were afraid to over cook and dry out the meat.  Anyway, now we've a pile of goose meat.  Sandwich anyone?

In other news, normally it's about 20F (-6C) when I wake, this morning it was 56F (13C) - and very windy in the bargain.  It blew down my windsock!  A storm front is blowing through; we even got a few sprinklings of moisture but not enough to measure.  It is the amount of rain that only screws up your clean car.  Glad ours is in the garage; not that it is all that clean anyway! 

Have a good one.