Smoked Christmas Goose with Jeweled Wild Rice and Roasted Root Vegetables
This bird was delicious! Besides the wife and I, I had 4 teenagers at the house Christmas Eve. Obviously, I only got to try a few small slivers of this meat because the teenagers devoured it. In fact, the two teenage girls, who I thought wouldn't touch this meal with a ten-foot pole, consumed the majority of it! If you have never cooked a Christmas Goose, you need to start next year. I highly recommend we put this bird back on the Christmas Menu!
I brined this bird overnight in an Apple & Sage brine and popped it on the smoker the next morning. I smoked it using Pecan wood chips (that I had soaking in a bucket of water for over an hour). I had placed an aluminum tray beneath the bird in the smoker to collect the goose fat, mainly because I wanted to avoid any flame ups from the fat dripping down. I have to say, I'm surprised at just how much fat these birds have and how aromatic it was. I had originally planned on doing some maple roasted carrots to serve as a side dish, but after smelling this Goose fat, I knew I had to alter my plans. I ran to the store and picked up some parsnips, sweet potatoes, baby red potatoes and a yellow onion. The maple roasted carrots, soon became Goose fat roasted root vegetables. I tossed the vegetables in the goose fat, then covered them with salt, pepper, fresh rosemary and thyme. I also couldn't resist using some of the Goose fat in my wild rice pilaf.
I had talked in my previous recipe about how I wanted to make some dishes that incorporated foods from the fall harvest. I was able to check off Persimmons, Pecans, Pears, and Pomegranates in the last recipe involving Pheasant (I didn't realize how many "p" words were in that recipe). Apples, Cranberries and the root vegetables all get to make an appearance here. While that doesn't check off all the fall produce check boxes, it's enough to satisfy me.
Merry Christmas!
Recipe coming soon.
About the Author : Jeff Davis
Visit authors website | View more articlesYou may think cooking and recipes don’t have much to do with a website dedicated to hunting dogs ... but really, why do we hunt? Sure, we enjoy watching our dogs work in the field and being outdoors, but ultimately, hunting is about survival and feeding our families. We might as well try to do it well. I'm not a chef and definitely no food authority ... but I do like to eat and enjoy cooking. After searching for people willing to share their recipes on Gundog Central, without much success, I decided to try to do a few on my own, with my wife Tami's help. The recipes I share here are things I like to eat and have made here at home. I've tried to include step-by-step instructions with each meal describing exactly how I did it, but my method may not be best, if you decide to try a recipe posted here, please use whatever technique you think works best, I'm simply sharing how I did it. You'll see a lot of recipes where I've tried to make things from starch, when I could have just used store bought ingredients, simply because I wanted to learn how something was done. My goal is to continually update these recipes as I learn new things and techniques. These are my attempts at creating good, home cooked food, that I would like to eat! If I'm sharing it here, my family and I enjoyed it and I believe you will too.
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