Pre-Christmas Dinner – Roast Goose

It’s become something of a tradition (if twice counts as a tradition – a tradition in the making maybe) for me and Kerri to have a pre-Christmas dinner with my sister and her husband shortly before we disappear off elsewhere for Christmas itself. Last year we had roast salmon with salsa verde; this year we decided to try our hand at cooking a goose.

I ordered the goose a few weeks ago, when we had decided on it. We liked the sound of Gordon Ramsay’s Christmas roast goose recipe, so went with that having never cooked one before. Because it said to get a 4kg to 5.5kg goose, that is what I asked the butcher for when I ordered it. And he wrote it down on the order form. When I went to pick up the goose, it was 6.5kg. Which is rather large. And the butcher claimed that it was very hard to get smaller ones. I ummed and aahed a bit about whether I still wanted it, but took it in the end because we’d planned everything around having goose, even though having the monster goose meant that we’d have dinner late and have loads of left-overs which we don’t need.

No, your eyes aren’t deceiving you, that’s not a goose. But it is goose foie gras on melba toasts that my sister brought along as a pre-starter snack. With some rather inexpertly sliced pieces of pickled walnut on top. The pickled walnuts were an impromptu addition that worked rather well.

Next up was smoked salmon with sour cream and lumpfish caviar, which was bright red and made it all look rather festive.

From this point on, the photography got a bit random and… well… just bad, due to rushing and scalding and various other goings-on. So this is what the goose looked like when it was done. The lemon and lime pieces had burnt, which was unfortunate, but that didn’t really matter as we weren’t planning to eat them:

With the goose we had roast potatoes of course, roasted in a mixture of goose fat (we have a large supply of it now) and vegetable oil. And cabbage with pancetta which was really good – the cabbage was an organic savoy cabbage from our vegetable box and although there was no butter or cream with it (just the pancetta, some finely sliced shallots, the shredded cabbage, a splash of water and a good grind of black pepper) but it had a lovely almost buttery taste to it. And roast parsnips with parmesan on top of them. And Gordon’s date and red wine sauce.

With so much going on, we thought that it might not all work together that well, but it did. The goose was really tasty, I’m glad I took it even though it was huge and we have half of it left over and it complicated our already rather over-complicated cooking schedule.

When we cooked Christmas pudding recently, we ended up with three instead of one. Kerri had the genius idea of making Christmas pudding ice cream out of one of them. We followed Nigel Slater’s mincemeat ice cream recipe, except added crumbled Christmas pudding instead of mincemeat. We were worried that it wouldn’t be sweet enough when we tasted it after mixing it together, but once it was frozen it seemed just right.

Cue rather rubbish picture of the ice cream:

My sister’s husband flambeed some caramelised bananas in rum, then served with a dollop of our Christmas pudding ice cream, it made for a really good alternative Christmas pudding experience.

All in all a really lovely pre-Christmas dinner. Yum.