Christmas goose - the verdict!

Well, I can at least say the goose was a success!  It wasn't at all fatty like I remember.  Actually, I found it tasted like turkey drumsticks.



Unfortunately, by the time we got to the entree, even with the long breaks in between courses, we were all so full, no one could eat much!  Of the five of us, two liked the goose quite a lot (including me), two could take it or leave it, while one didn't like it at all.  Which isn't too bad, considering we all have very different tastes!

As for the rest:

Smoked mozzarella mashed potatoes
(quantities to taste)

yellow potatoes, cooked and mashed with:
smoked mozzarella, shredded
sour cream
garlic granules
crumbled bacon
salt and pepper

Broccoli done the Julia Child way.

Place florets and peeled stems in a pot with about half an inch of water.  Cook with lid on until almost tender.  Drain.  Return to pot with butter, minced garlic, salt and pepper to taste.  Cook in butter until crisply tender.

Soooo good!

Now we need to wait around for dessert. :-D

Christmas Eve - our goose is cooked!

Part One
Part Two

These should be the last photos of the goose preprations.

The goose itself, cooked to an internal temperature of 82F, finished roasting a fair bit faster than the time recommended by weight.  Here's how it turned out.



It's looking quite crispy, which is what I like.  Here, it's been moved to the platter so I could drain the roasting pan.  As I write this, it's back in the roaster and staying warm in the oven.






I drained the roaster into a 1 quart canning jar, including some of the drippings, but it was too much.  Aside from this amount, I got a soup bowl's worth of drippings that still had a small amount of fat on top.

I'm hanging on to the fat, as it's supposed to be really good to cook with.

As for the drippings, I used them to make a gravy.  There was not much more than a cup of drippings, two which I added a splash of red wine and another of orange juice and brought to a boil.  I thickened it with corn start.  No other seasonings were added.  It's a rather tangy gravy that I kinda like.

Meanwhile, on the assembly line, we've got Bacon and Cheddar devilled eggs, mashed yellow potatoes with smoked mozarella, garlic and bacon bits, and broccoli a la Julia Child.

I'm getting soooo hungry!

Christmas Eve - cooking our goose

Part one

The goose is now in the oven, so I've got a bit of a break before I have to start the next longest cooking items.



The first order of business was to remove the goose from the marinade.  There wasn't a whole heck of a lot to take it out of.  I decided to leave some of the marinade herbs on the goose, putting more into the cavity.  Then there was the job of piercing the skin with a fork all over.  Some areas were very hard to pierce.  I hope I was thorough enough.  I didn't truss it, though I did cut slits on either side of the tail bone and tucked the ends of the drumsticks in.






I was thrilled to find a turkey lifter a couple of days ago.  It's got little legs to keep the bird lifted.  For the cooking/basting liquid, I combine roughly 1 cup each of red wine, orange juice and boiling water.  Mdm Benoit seemed adamant about not using anything cold on a goose in all her recipes, so I thought adding the boiling water might be a good idea.

The goose is seasoned with our favourite spice mix.  As for the wine, I picked this one for cooking with because it was cheap.  I'm trying a glass to drink right now, and I can't say I'd recommend it for drinking.  You know how, when tasting red wine, you're supposed to swirl it in the glass to check the viscosity?  It doesn't seem to have any.  Why that makes a difference, I don't know.  Either way, it's a pretty mediocre wine.  Not bad, but not good, either.  I'm not a wine drinker, though, so take it for what it's worth. *L*

For the meal itself, I picked a Big Ass Zin.  We've tried Big Ass Cab before and enjoyed it.  I considered getting it again, but wanted to try something different.  I have to admit, I bought the brand for the label art!  Like I said, I'm not a wine drinker, and I don't know brands.  So I usually end up picking them based on descriptions and, lately, humour (we picked up some Vampire wine recently, too).  Not the best way to pick a wine, I must admit!  When I saw the Big Ass Cab label, I was smitten by the joie de vivre.  I couldn't help but think that a company that had such a lively sense of humour just had to have good taste, too!  Thankfully, the wine lived up my hopes.  I would definitely recommend it.  Hopefully, we'll be just as happy with the Zin as well.

Merry Christmas!

We begin our celebrations tonight, but I'll still try to post photos as I'm able.  Just in case I don't get a chance, though, I will take this opportunity to wish you all a joyous and peaceful Christmas, and a happy new year!



Here is our totally unfashionable, wild and eclectic Christmas tree, covered almost entirely with many years of hand made decorations.  There were a few that aren't on there, as we ran out of spce. 

Maybe next year, we'll have a second tree for the girls. :-D

Getting ready - preparing the Christmas goose

While we were still living in Manitoba, we shared our celebrations among three households, Reveillon with my husband's parents, Christmas day with my parents, and finally a party at my BIL's on Boxing Day.  Now that we live with no other family nearby, we've started to celebrate Wigilia on Christmas Eve.  Sort of.  There's pretty much nothing about the food that's traditionally Polish anymore!  Instead, we explore with different dishes and new foods.

This year, I'm doing a goose.

I've never cooked goose before.  In fact, I had been thoroughly turned off of goose the one time my mother served us a domestic goose.  Our previous experience had been with a Canada Goose my father had shot one year that was delicious, so we had high expectations.  I was pretty young, so I don't remember the taste all that much, but I do still remember being incredibly disgusted by the fattiness.  I don't think any of use were really able to eat it.  My mother never served goose again.

Over the years, I've encountered many references to goose and even goose grease, which had many uses, including medicinal.  Goose was clearly greatly enjoyed by many, with glowing descriptions of the flavour, and I could never understand why!

Fairly recently, while watching some Julia Child dvds, I discovered that goose skin was supposed to be pierced before cooking to allow the fat to drain out.  I now suspect that this was a step that got missed - we certainly never had to do it for any other birds we cooked!  Armed with this information, we decided to give it a try this year.

In going through my recipe books, I find myself turning once again to Mdm Benoit.  We'll be skipping the stuffing, but will roast the goose according to her basic method, then using a red wine/orange juice baste from modified from another recipe while it's baking.  The basic roasting instructions includes a 24 hour marinade, which I'm late for by a few hours.  The marinade is made up of:

Juice of 2 lemons
1/2 cup oil
1 carrot, coarsely grated
1 onion, thickly sliced (my fresh onion is for something else, so I used dry)
1 clove garlic, halved
6 whole cloves
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp basil
1 handful parsley

The first step is to "Wipe the goose with a cloth dipped in vinegar.  Do not scald, nor soak in cold water, nor wash with soap."

Soap??

The recipe doesn't make for a lot of marinade.  The only container I've got that's big enough to hold the goose to marinade is my roaster.



That one clove of garlic looks so lonely and ineffectual!  What you can't see is the huge neck tucked under the bird.  I had expected the neck to be removed, like with a turkey.  It didn't come with the liver or heart or anything, either.  Oh, well.

I covered it with plastic wrap, since it won't fit in my fridge with the lid on.  I'll have to make a point of remembering to turn it after a few hours or something, since what little liquid there is is lining the bottom of the roaster.

Other recipes I looked at included things like "remove excess fat from inside the cavity," but I didn't find any.  I guess the company that preps these birds is rather thorough about such things.

I really, really hope this works out.  I may have been young that one time I had domestic goose, but the memory of that fattiness still gives me the willies. If, however, it doesn't work... well, we have lots of tourtierre!

Christmas tourtierre, day two, part two

Day one - making the filling.
Day two, part one - making the dough.

Now for day two, part two - assembling and baking the tourtierre!

Just a warning, this post is going to be image heavy. :-D




After the dough has had a chance to chill, we set up our assembly line.  For what is usually my part, I've got the filling (stirred up to make it easier to scoop) with a larger spoon, a smaller spoon to smooth out the filling in the crust, a bowl of water to moisten the edges of the bottom crust for the top crust, a paring knife to cut the excess dough off and cut in steam vents.  The lumps of dough tend to be a bit hard to work with, so when I have a moment, I grab some and knead it to make it more pliable.  We've also got the pie plates ready and waiting.  My younger daughter had the job shuttling things between me and my husband.




My husband takes the job of rolling out the dough - at least as long as he can.  This job is quite hard on the back. :-(

We roll the dough between two layers of heavy vinyl.  It makes the job much easier.  Clean up is easier, too.




The very first completed pie.  Isn't it pretty? :-D

Our oven can bake 3 pies at a time, so we work in groups of three.  We'd do the bottoms and filling for three pies, then to the tops.  By then, the oven is preheated and my older daughter starts on the baking.

The baking changes with every move, depending on what oven we've got at the time.  The recipe says to bake at 500F until golden brown, but we've never gone that hot.  Our current oven has a cool spot in the back left.  There's a couple of things we do to compensate for it.  One is to bake with a pan of water in the lower rack.  The steam helps even out the heat.  If we've got more than one item in at once (like when I'm doing 2 loaves of bread), we switch them around half way through baking.




Here are the first two batches (minus a pie that was sacrificed to the greater good...).  The batches are cooled in phases.  When they first come out of the oven, they rest on the stove for a bit.  Then they get moved to a towel lined ironing board I set up near the back door.   By the time the surface is completely covered, the first batch is cool enough to head outside.






These prairie winters come in handy!  The pies are placed between layers of towels for protection and left until frozen.  Once completely frozen, we wrap them in heavy duty foil.  We don't have a large enough freezer for them all, so they usually end up in a box or bin and go back outside.




Here are the first couple of pies using the paprika enhanced dough.  We haven't tried one yet.  We did notice a significant difference in the dough, though.  The first few batches were the herb dough with pastry flour.  Those were much easier to roll out and handle.  The all purpose flour batches are much denser.  However the paprika dough, even though it was with all purpose flour, was a lot smoother and more pliable.  Not quite the same as the pastry dough batches, but similar.





After baking, the paprika dough loses some of its brilliant orange colouring.

When we start getting to the end of the filling, things start to get a bit more creative.





The remaining filling wasn't enough to fill a regular sized pie, so I made a couple of tart sized pies.  I was just mucking about and came up with these two.  I did one more, but it's just a meat filled rectangle.




I think they turned out rather well.  We didn't bother freezing these.  They'll make handy little snacks or lunches for my husband to take to work, I think. :-D

Once all the filling is gone, there's usually some left over dough.  In fact, we look forward to there being extra dough!  Here's what I made with half of it.



I kneaded some shredded aged cheddar cheese into the dough, then rolled it out.  I wanted to get a nice, neat rectangle out of it.  In the end, I ended up folding the edges towards the middle on two sides, then folded it in half, to get a long sort of loaf shape.  I cut that to get these little biscuity things.  I considered buttering the dough before folding, which would have been delicious, but it was past midnight and I just wasn't up to finding out where the butter dish ended up. *L*



Meanwhile, my older daughter used the other half of the dough, without added cheese, to make a whole bunch of little shapes that would bake a lot faster.

Leftover dough makes for great snacks like this.

That's it!  Our 2010 Christmas tourtierre are all done.  Final count: 23 pies (6 in paprika dough), 3 mini pies and a whole bunch of biscuit thingies.

I refuse to overwhelm ourselves with baking over the holidays and am more than willing to "cheat" by buying baked goods, but this is one family tradition I look forward to every year and passing on to our children.

Christmas tourtierre, day two

The first half of our dough making is now done.  I figured I'd post a couple of shots before we start our assembly line.



We make our tourtierre with a hot water dough (another Mdm Benoit recipe) rather than the flakier cold water dough I usually use.  Here's the basic recipe our version is a variation of.

Mdm Benoit Hot Water Pie Crust
(enough for 1 double crusted pie)

1/4 cup water
1/2 cup shortening
1 1/2 cups pastry flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder.

Bring water to a boil.  Add shortening.  Remove from heat and stir until smooth.

Sift, measure and re-sift flour with salt and baking powder.  Combine mixtures.  Stir until smooth.

Set in covered container and chill for 2-3 hours.

We do ours in triple batches.  Usually I just use all purpose flour, but this year I tried pastry flour for about half the batches.  Usually we use Crisco shortening, but since they went transfat free, the resulting dough has a very different texture, so I'm trying a new brand.  As you can see by the photo, we also add egg and some herbs to the mix.  With so many batches to make, there's no way we'd do it all by hand!  I get one of my daughters to measure and sift the batches of dry ingredients while I use a kettle to boil the water and a food processor to whip up the liquid ingredients.  Then I transfer it to my KitchenAide mixer (best kitchen appliance I never paid for! *L*) with a beater attachment.  After beating in several cups of flour, I transfer to a dough hook and finish it off.  Then the dough it divided into three balls and set aside for chilling while the next triple batch is made.



Once all the batches were done, they joined the meat on the balcony to chill.  The bright orange dough is a new experiment this year; instead of herbs, the last two triple batches have paprika in them.  Should be interesting!

While the dough chilled, we headed out to do our annual Christmas family photo.  The meat is now inside to get closer to room temperature.  It won't take long, as it didn't freeze overnight; not even at the edges.  I'll have photos of the assembly later on.  Whether or not I get them up by tonight is a different thing. ;-)