Last Quiet Workout

Oh the gym will get crowded next week, I'm sure. And stay that way a while. On the plus side, I'll be curious to see what the latest trends are for the legions of personal trainers.

With Discounts Like These, ....

Christmas Confit

Today is confit day. I have four goose legs well-rubbed with salt, garlic, bay leaf, and thyme for the past 48 hours. The roast goose breast on the bone turned out perfectly for our Boxing Day feast. I've rendered all the fat from the geese as well. Lovely stuff. Now to cook the legs, jar them, and resist eating them.

A Word on Knives

I love my Global knives for most cooking prep tasks, but for finessing the legs off a goose or turning a boneful piece of meat into a boneless one, hard to top the value of plastic-handled eicker trade knives. The one I just used on the christmas geese cost less than £10.

LOTR

Just re-read The Lord Of The Rings. Think I'd last re-read it just before the films came out. Re-reading the books has been a self-indulgence and a comfort coming up on 3 decades now. Some observations:

This time I re-read on the iPad, instead of my still-surviving 30 yr-old prints. This was more convenient but I realized partway in that some of the comfort derives from those old physical artifacts, with the age-darkened pages and that particular typeset.

Shadowfax. Good lord do they go on and on about that damn horse. Seriously, wtf?

I forgive the movies a lot of sins, but the egregious modernization of Faramir is still appalling. Tolkien's heroes were pre-modern, and I get that Jackson felt the misguided urge to make them modern [most of them, that is; Karl Urban's Eomer was still allowed to be awesome, because nobody fucks with Norse horsemen]. This business of feminizing the heroes was a shame for Aragorn, but he was still excellently played by Viggo Mortensen, and he got his moments. With Faramir, there was nowhere for the acting to go. He's all kinds of awesome in the book. It would have been more merciful to cut him from the film.

The palpable sense of loss that pervades and defines the books is still heartbreaking and wonderful.

Christmas Goose

The geese are ordered. Only 2 this year. Recently finished off the last of last year's (final freezer bag of roasted, diced goose breast, reheated and served over shredded sweetheart cabbage with some sour cream and lime wedges).

My plan, as usual:
(1) confit the legs
cut off the legs, rub generously with a mix of salt, finely chopped bay leaves, thyme, garlic (make lots, reserve some) and put uncovered on a plate in fridge
after 24 hours, re-rub the remaining spice mix and put on  clean plate for another night
scrape spices into a roasting pan, briefly brown the legs in butter or olive oil in a heavy pan
add legs to the pan -- pick a pan in which there is as little space left as possible, really crowd them in
cover with melted goose fat and cook for a few hours at 150C until very tender
(for goose fat -- scoop out hunks of fat from the cavity of your goose and render it down, you can also buy some extra to get you started the first time you do this; save all the fat for next time and you won't need to buy it again)
remove the legs, put them into glass jars or another sealable container, cover with the goose fat (strain via muslin), close
they will last for a couple months like this if not too warm, or many more months in the fridge
or eat them immediately
crisp them up in a very hot oven on a rack in a pan before serving
strain any/all leftover fat through muslin and store in jars for reuse -- goose fat is a great fat to cook with in general, does not need to be saved just for future confit

(2) roast the rest
stab the skin all over with a fork (or don't, nothing bad seems to happen if I forget this step)
rub in some salt and black pepper (or use an alternate rub)
roast on a rack in a pan in a fairly hot oven quickly (I generally use 220C, but 200C would work if you want a bit less risk of smoke)
I would tend to pull it out when the coolest part of the breast reaches 65C, or I might not wait that long
some people cook it much higher
if you cook with the legs on you have to deal with the classic roast bird problem of the legs being better, generally, a bit overcooked, while the breasts fare better being undercooked -- in goose this problem gets even trickier because, as with duck, I like the breasts a bit more on the rare side

remove it from the oven and let it rest 20-30 minutes before carving and serving
the skin should be nice and crisp, with an almost bacony crackling saltiness to it

be sure to strain the fat from the pan through muslin and save in jars for future use!

stuffing: generally no longer stuff the geese, but when we did, a prune/apple/onion/armagnac-type thing in the cavity worked well, but the real treat was a sausage-like stuffing of the neck

Probably the best full-goose treatment I've seen is in The River Cottage Year, in which Hugh Fairly-Longname does a confit of the legs, a separate cooking of the stuffed neck, and a roast of the rest.


For fancier full-goose christmasy roast recipes, I've not tried these, but they all look credible:
this or this or this

My Zombie Baseball Movie

"The Balking Dead", starring James Earl Jones and the reanimated corpse of Kevin Costner. Had to cut the scene where Tom Hanks explains the infield fly rule to the zombie Cubs, but it will be an extra on the DVD, I promise.

Thanksgiving Cooking Notes

Very much in the vein of last year, and following on from previous year. 6 adults on Saturday, plus kids, one of whom eats as an adult now.

Friday:

• chestnut dressing, same as last year except added some ceps and oyster mushrooms browned in butter.
• green bean casserole (same as last year)
• poached turkey legs in goose fat, also did 4 chicken legs with them for good measure
• roasted and made stock (onions, garlic, celery, bay leaf) out of the back of the turkey

Saturday:

• made brownies (with pecans), same as last year
• made gravy by thickening turkey stock with a roux
• roasted the turkey (5.6kg whole), as last year, 45 minutes back up at 220C, then flipped and cooked at 200C until done, then rested for 30+ minutes
• mashed potatoes (about 5 lbs worth; butter, double cream)
• while turkey was resting, heated at 180C+fan: dressing (uncovered), green beans (uncovered), legs (covered)
• JJ made fresh cranberry salad

Timing worked out great. Turkey turned out really well. There was plenty for everyone and enough for leftovers.

School of Bruce

All rockstars should be Bruce Springsteen. Seriously, is it too late to sign Keith & Mick up for some remedial tutoring?

Still waiting for the NFL to make an edict that all superbowl halftime shows must either be Bruce or be a marching band.

chicken wings

After occasional cravings, I finally took a stab at making buffalo-style chicken wings. Turned out to be incredibly easy. Prepping the wings is simple if you've got a knife with a bit of rigor to it. I went with baking instead of frying. They'd probably be a bit better fried, this worked great. Overcook on a rack in a roasting tin (I went 200C for maybe an hour or so), most skinful side up, and finish under the broiler to really crisp up the skins if they're not crackling enough for you. Toss hot in large bowl with sauce, which, simply enough, is a tabasco, melted butter, and white wine vinegar mix at (officially) 5:4:1 ratio. Unofficially I just mix roughly equal parts of melted butter and tabasco and then put a splash of vinegar in. Mix then toss (don't skimp!) piping-hot wings in a bowl, serve, eat.

F1 goes ficto-futuristic

Armored cars, gun-toting bandits... yes, somewhat insane, but maybe it's only a matter of time before we get to see kung-fu fighting in the pit lane.

What a Relief!

Oklahoma passed an anti-Sharia law. Phew! That must've been a close call for them. Next up: I'm proposing ballot initiatives to ban monsters under my bed.