The Friday morning before Christmas, the Carnivore and I received a box of fresh, organic fruits and vegetables, compliments of Abel & Cole. Our box contained apples, fairtrade bananas, carrots, clementines, leeks, mushrooms, parsnips, potatoes, red onions, and a Savoy cabbage, with a liberal helping of good English dirt. Leeks and parsnips are vegetables not usually found in the average American grocery store, so I’d never prepared either before. Fortunately, my wonderful Fanny Farmer Cookbook provided plenty of guidance, and the Carnivore and I dined like kings for a week on the goodies we’d received.
Scrape the parsnips (I used six, which made for a lot of mash!) and cut them into ½-inch sticks, two or three inches long. Cook in boiling water until tender, about ten minutes. (Definitely add the parsnips to the water simultaneously; I did mine in stages and wound up with a few crunchy ones.) Drain and mash as you would potatoes. (They’re very soft and easy to mash after they’re boiled.) Add 1 tablespoon butter, 1-2 tablespoons heavy cream (or add milk to taste, for a slightly lower calorie-count), and crushed garlic. As I like my garlic mashes really garlicky, I added for crushed cloves. Season with salt and pepper.
Parsnips have a lovely little bite to their flavor, reminiscent of a good raw turnip. I would like to try this recipe again with a little horseradish, though that might overwhelm the flavor of the parsnips.
Roast Goose with Garlic-Potato Stuffing
The Carnivore and I made a goose for our Christmas dinner last year, and it went over very well with all the household carnivores (including the cat). Last year we stuffed it with roasted fingerling potatoes, to wonderful effect. This year, however, we made a garlic mash with our Abel & Cole potatoes and stuffed the goose with that. They may have been the best mashed potatoes I’ve ever eaten.
To make the mash, we peeled, quartered and boiled five medium potatoes until tender. The Carnivore mashed them with four tablespoons of butter, milk to taste, and several cloves of garlic, then added salt and pepper. We set this aside while we prepared the goose.
We started with a 5.5 kilo goose fresh from Borough Market. (I don’t remember which trader, but their stand is on Stoney Street nearly across from the Market Porter.) We cleaned out its internal cavity, saving the giblets for gravy and disposing of the extra fat. We then pricked the skin, to release the fat as it melted during roasting. Finally we stuffed the goose with the mash and used a skewer to close it up. We rubbed the outside of the goose with salt and pepper and then stuck it in the oven, basting every twenty minutes. (The oven had been pre-heated to 375 F/190 C.) Although this was a large bird, it roasted in only three hours.
After we removed it from the oven we scooped the mash to serve separately, and let the goose sit for another ten or so minutes before carving. We set our goose on the table alongside those delicious, goose-fat-roasted mashed potatoes, cranberries, samphire sautéed in chili-infused oil, broiled asparagus, and a fresh loaf of ciabatta from Borough. We drank a Chateauneuf-du-Pape with dinner and finished with cheese and lemon meringue tarts.
Unstuffing the goose, post-roasting.
Our marvelous slate cheese platter.
Our goose, flanked by its future devourers.
It being the holidays, we didn't eat at home every night, so we weren't able to try everything in our box from Abel & Cole. That said, everything we did sample was high-quality and delicious. The delivery man was nice, the newsletter that came with the box was chatty and friendly and had a couple of great recipes on it, as well as excellent suggestions for edible centerpieces and clever ways to reuse the box and string it came tied in. This is our first experience with delivery vegetables, and it couldn't have been nicer.
I love goose - but am worried to hear that you 'disposed' of the internal fat! Best bet is to render it down (either on it's own very gently or in simmering water then separate). You can then store it (or freeze it) and use it for future roast potatoes!
Posted by: Richard | January 07, 2009 at 01:22 PM
Our cookbook highly recommended rendering and saving the fat, but we decided not to tempt ourselves with it over the coming months. Having roasted potatoes (and other vegetables) in goose fat, we know how delicious it is! But we try to eat healthy at home, more or less, and keeping that goose fat around would have taxed our self-restraint!
Posted by: Anne | January 07, 2009 at 01:28 PM