Lea Wait, here, preparing for the first Christmas in years when several of my daughters will be here in Maine. That’s good, and a reminder of years when they were growing up and I prepared for Christmas all year. But it’s also a sad reminder that this year Bob won’t be here to share the holiday. A time for memories. So today I decided to share a post I wrote several years ago.
My husband Bob and I live far from daughters, brothers, and sisters, so we spend our holidays cozily together in Maine, dependant on telephone calls, Skype visits, and email to tie us to family and friends. We’ve developed our own way of celebrating.
We both love cooking. And eating. (No doubt too much the second.) And careers as an artist and a writer aren’t exercise conducive. So after the holidays, each year we become Spartan, and we diet. Atkins, usually, and usually for several months.
But before that, we have one last adventurous meal.
Last Christmas, we discussed our options for several weeks. (The decision is, of course, at least half the fun, especially if made while sipping wine and lingering over an assortment of tempting cookbooks.)
And last year we decided to cook a goose.
Neither of us had ever done that before. And, after all, Christmas goose is traditional. Dickens, among other authorities, says so.
We knew just where such a perfect fowl could be obtained. On a small hill on Route 90 (also known as Camden Road) in Warren sits an enticing shop called Curtis Custom Meats. Although Curtis specializes in cuts of beef, lamb and pork (perhaps plebian elsewhere, but not here, where they raise and butcher their own), Curtis Meats is also the place for obtaining chicken, turkey, quail, and duck. Goose? But of course.
I was doing a signing in Camden, so I was the one appointed to pick out our goose. That day they had half a dozen. I’d never bought a goose, so I was a bit dismayed by two facts. First, geese are much longer and skinnier than the turkeys and chickens I was used to cooking. Second, they are MUCH more expensive. (Think $50 instead of $12 for a similarly sized turkey.) I’ll admit I almost chickened out right then. (ouch)
But we’d decided on goose, so goose it was.
I choose one and he (she?) came home with me.
The next step was pouring through cookbooks again. How to cook our goose?
Perhaps overly influenced by several viewings of Julie and Julia, we decided Julia Child would be our authority. She informed us we would first need to steam our duck in a covered roaster to render the fat.
We did not own a covered roaster.
So the weekend before the big “cooking of the goose” we headed out for one of the most complete kitchen supply stores we knew of in Maine — The Well Tempered Kitchen in Waldoboro. The owner kindly told us covered roasters hadn’t been made in perhaps thirty years. “But,” we explained, “Julia said!” “You could use foil,” she suggested. Several other helpful customers chimed in with similar suggestions.
“Have any of you ever cooked a goose?” we asked. No one had.
In lieu of options, we decided foil would have to do, although it didn’t fit Julia’s strict instruction for a “tight cover.” Her next command was titled, “Surgery.” I won’t bore you with details other than to confirm that, yes, a goose contains a great deal of fat. I felt as though I’d applied about twenty layers of suet to every part of my body that came near that bird. Surgery was followed by Seasoning. Trussing. Steaming. Braising. Roasting. And, finally – Browning. Gravy and Carving finally followed.
The entire process took longer than Julia suggested, and required a great deal of checking along the way (which probably lengthened the cooking time, since we did more than the usual oven peeking and temperature taking.)
Julia also decreed that the only acceptable stuffing for a goose had to include prunes, so we made her prune and apple stuffing with sausage. We had our doubts about it in theory. But it turned out rich and spectacular.
Results? The goose was good, but, we sadly decided, for us not really worth the time and money we’d spent on it. (That stuffing was fantastic, though!) We saved the goose fat and liver for other experiments, other days, so considered those bonuses.
And – we do recommend goose for the holidays. Or – for one holiday, anyway! It was fun.
This year we’re having filet mignon (from Curtis Meats) smothered in mushrooms and a goose liver and port pate´. (Hmmm …. wonder where that liver came from ???!) Served with champagne, of course. (We believe champagne goes with everything. We’re very flexible when it comes to champagne.)
Merry Christmas!
Marcus Junius Brutus knifes through your lower back and you want to drop to your knees but you can’t because you know if you do you won’t be able to get up again. Then a dull throbbing ache takes up residence for a few hours until you bend over to pick up a cat toy and do it all over again.
was rejected seventeen times before it found a publisher. Mosley has published more than forty books, many of them bestsellers, but even he gets rejected sometimes. The book was, judged by different publishers as too political, too strange, and goodness knows too what else.
We’re in a field looking at Vermont’s impossibly green hills, sitting where generations of writers have come to learn the craft. Our instructor tells us she wants a short, short story about something that deeply affected us, told in the point of view of someone else. She says our work merely skirts human emotion and we must go deeper. “Try letting yourself out through another’s eyes.”
Next week at Maine Crime Writers, there will be posts by Kaitlyn Dunnett/Kathy Lynn Emerson (Monday) Sandra Neily (Tuesday), Kate Flora (Wednesday) Dick Cass (Thursday), and Lea Wait (Friday).
Lea Wait/Cornelia Kidd