[the_old_crowd] Re: Holiday Greetings! (Getting More OT All the Time)

[Kat Macfarlane]

What on /earth/ does one do with a quart and a half of goose grease? 
In-depth facials for the next twelve months? Alternative auto fuel?

Those honkers at the University of Washington were certainly no 
fifteen-pounders! More like the USS Nimitz coming ashore with blood in 
its eye! There's something about the S-curve of the neck and the 
downward slant of the wings that makes a sensible person want to get out 
of the vicinity real fast.

No, I'm not a country girl; city- and academia-bred all my life, though 
the academic side of things at least does have its Culinary Moments 
(there was the tongue with fur on in chromium-yellow caper sauce at 
Columbia, and the aptly named Cheesy Garden Casserole at UW). I had the 
good fortune to be a medical brat, and my father discovered cholesterol 
in the early 1960s; since my mother was a middle-western farm girl and 
thought Crisco was a food group all by itself, it fell to me to develop 
recipes that didn't involve saturated fat. I got pretty good at it if I 
do say so <http://www.katnmac.com/VirtualCookbook.htm>, though I've gone 
back to using butter instead of margarine in my old age to avoid trans 
fats (it tastes better too), at least in baking. Everywhere else I use 
olive oil (Mediterranean) or peanut oil (Oriental). (So that you won't 
lie awake all night wondering: The peanut started out in Peru, and got 
to China and India the same way hot peppers did, by way of enterprising 
Spanish traders who carried the good stuff from their New World colonies 
to interested connoisseurs everywhere else in the world. Think of them 
kindly the next time you enjoy a good curry. The chocolate, of course, 
they took back to Spain, not wanting to waste the /really/ good stuff on 
ignorant heathens.)

There now. Don't you feel better for having had a little history lesson 
before goose?

Slightly dyspeptic purrs,

--Gatta

Barry Arrowsmith wrote:
>
> --- In the_old_crowd at yahoogroups.com 
> <mailto:the_old_crowd%40yahoogroups.com>, Kat Macfarlane <katmac at ...> 
> wrote:
> >
> > Dear one,
> >
> > If I cooked a goose (or a turkey either), my goose would be /cooked/! I
> > am a small woman (4'10" at last reckoning), and weigh approximately 130
> > pounds, so the goose would probably win the battle paddles down (and
> > shit all over the kitchen floor into the bargain). Even if it didn't, I
> > live in a tiny little apartment with a tiny little refrigerator. 
> What on
> > earth would a person like me do with the Brontosaurus after the Feast,
> > assuming that there is room in here for a Feast, and assuming I liked
> > turkey, which I don't? I don't know about goose, never sampled one and
> > probably never will, though got a rather bad impression of them from 
> the
> > Canada geese that hung out on Lake Washington in my doctoral years and
> > energetically pursued anyone they perceived as having a picnic on them.
> >
> > (I often wonder if cave women ever had this problem. ("Oh my /Gawd/,
> > he's bringing home another damned /mastodon/!")
> >
> > I'm glad you got so much enjoyment (and so much fat) out of your goose,
> > but I think I will stick to skinless, boneless chicken breasts as
> > something my size can deal with without a great deal of angst and 
> bother.
> >
> > Slightly overet purrs,
> >
> > --Gatta
>
> Um.
> Well, mine was dead when I got it. Not that I'm averse to slaughtering 
> beasties,
> though I suspect that in my enthusiasm it could get..... messy. And 
> plucking
> the damn thing would be a pain in the ar*e, frankly.
>
> No country-girl you, that's obvious. Geese aren't in the same size league
> as turkeys - average size for a fat farm-bred free-range goose is 
> about 12 -
> 13 lbs, going down to 9lb or up to about 15 max. Wild ones tend a bit 
> smaller.
> Fits in a halfway decent oven.
> >From a mid-size you'll get about 3 pints of goose fat, leaving a 
> cooked carcase
> of roughly 8 lb (including bones) which, with some plucky work with 
> the elbows
> means it won't still be occupying the fridge/freezer come Easter, but 
> will be a
> pleasant memory before New Year. Ideal, IMO.
>
> And just think, you'll be exacting an annual revenge on those 
> Washingtonian
> hissers. Serves 'em right. You are at the top of the food chain, after 
> all.
>
>  



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