Chicken soup for the rhinovirus-ridden

It’s totally and completely sad (well, a little sad) that I, at almost 30 years old, call my mother for sympathy every time I get sick. I just have to. I feel like my Mom validates my illness, somehow. Until my Mom feels sorry for me, I am just whiny and annoying. After she tells me “Ooooohhh, you poor thing…,” all of a sudden I am sick, a patient in need of care and attention, completely justified in my whimpers and whines and validated in my illness.

So, if you haven't guessed, I have a cold (or a rhinovirus infection, as we science geeks like to refer to it). I spent the weekend in abject misery, swallowing handfuls of decongestants, which are worth less than their candy coating, as far as my sinuses are concerned. I was preparing myself for a slow and painful death by starvation and neglect (I get dramatic when I am sick) when the man-friend (did we decide to call him the Texan? Yes, let’s shall) swept in with bags of groceries, all set to make me chicken soup. All together now: Aaaawwww.

The soup he made, from America’s Test Kitchen cookbook, may have saved both my life and my mother from 10 more whiny phone calls. The soup was absurdly complex, beginning with a most peculiar recipe for chicken stock.

The recipe starts with a butt ton (technical term here, people) of chicken drumsticks (bones cracked with a cleaver for maximal flavor extraction) which one browns on all sides, in batches in a Dutch oven. The chicken is then allowed to sweat until it releases juices, a step which the cookbook says greatly decreases the simmering time necessary for full flavoring of the stock. After sweating, water is added and the chicken is simmered with bay leaf and sautéed onions. A little less than sixty minutes from the start of this lengthy procedure, the stock is strained and then, and only then, can one start on the soup.

Into the strained stock went big chunks of carrot, celery, onion, shredded chicken, dried thyme, an ear of corn, three handfuls of orzo pasta, and fresh parsley at the very end. Et voila, the most beautiful bowl of chicken soup my rhinovirus-dimmed eyes had ever seen:


The resulting soup was very rich - all the collagen from the chicken drumsticks made the broth thick and velvety. The soup actually set into aspic after a night in the fridge! The chicken itself was moist and flavorful, not rubbery and dead like all chicken coming out of a long-simmering broth. The vegetables though, the vegetables were the best part. The corn absorbed the copious amounts of chicken fat and became the softest, creamiest corn of all time, all while still retaining the snap of the individual kernels. It was divine.

I suspect the soup tastes best when someone makes it for you, unprompted and unselfishly, all the while you blow your nose loudly and whimper about how you are going to die imminently. Have someone make this soup for you next time you are sick. I am pretty sure you will feel better right away. Or at least you will feel your illness has been validated and you are being taken care of.


P.S. The recipe for this whole business is way too long for me to retype and really isn’t the point of this post, which is my feeling sick and whiny. So I won’t type it. Instead, I am going to sit on my couch and swallow more useless decongestants.

Battling Through Imprecision In My Love for Chicken Livers

Chicken livers. How can something so good be reviled by so many people? I am convinced that when someone doesn’t like a particular ingredient or dish, it’s just because they have never had it done well. So many chicken livers come out overcooked, grainy, grey, and dry. They really can be gross. If done well, however, they can be amazing.

The best chicken liver I have ever had was at the The Spotted Pig in NY. The livers came out charred and crisp on the outside, but meltingly creamy and foie gras-like on the inside. They were more decadent than I thought humble chicken livers could ever be. The Bordeaux reduction sauce pooling around them may have had something to do with it, but the livers themselves were simply spectacular.

This chicken liver experience, combined with the fact that I love them love them on any regular day, made me crave it with a pang. I took the first opportunity to make chicken liver pate, following a recipe out of Jamie Oliver’s Jamie’s Kitchen.

Here’s the thing about Jamie Oliver. He is all about the Naked Chef thing – simple food, un-fussed with ingredients, simple processes, great results. Turns out that translates into imprecise directions, and weird quantities like “a small bunch” of thyme, a glass full of brandy, and an onion. What do you mean, onion? Large? Small? Jumbo? Come on! I follow protocols. I need precise instructions. There is no “bunch” in my vocabulary. There are strict volumes and weights. I had total irritation.

He also makes everything sounds easy breezy – bang it in there, slap on some of this, bake off for a minute. Whatev. He uses hard core French techniques just like every other big important chef. The recipe called for the prepared pate to be passed through a sieve twice to make it smooth. After spending 20 minutes huffing and puffing over the first sieve pass, I said no more. It was smooth enough for my peasant tastes.

I quit with the sieving I portioned out the pate into eight ramekins, topped with a fried sage leaf, and sealed the top with clarified butter, to prevent gross dried out pate from peaking through the top. As you may be able to tell from the pictures, I didn’t do so well with that part.


I did do very well with the pate consumption, however. I think I ate my body weight in chicken liver pate that evening. Breaking through the clarified butter top to reach the silky pate was deeply satisfying. The pate was not too rich, with a subtle liver flavor. I had hoped for more of the brandy and thyme to come through, but without precise measurements (I am going to blame the directions, not the execution) I think I was slightly off and did not add enough of either.

While the recipe is neither precise nor terribly straight forward, it is still worth a try. I know I will be making it again very soon.

The menu below was adapted from the original. I took out all the annoying “get yourself a frying pan” bits, and made it as precise as I could, while adding in a few of my own modifications. Stop thinking about liver as liver and think iof it as something wonderful. There. That's my last plug for chicken liver.

Chicken Liver Pate

Serves 6 (though I would say 4, depending on the size of your ramekins/serving dishes)

1 ¾ cups softened butter
olive oil
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1lb chicken livers, trimmed
1 sm bunch of fresh thyme, leaves picked ad chopped
1 lg wineglass of brandy
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper
a few sage leaves

Melt 11 tablespoons of butter over very low heat. Pour off the yellow butter (or ghee), leaving behind the white milky solids. Set aside.

Fry onion and garlic in olive oil over medium low heat for 5-10 minutes, until the onion is soft and translucent. Remove the onion to a bowl, wipe out the pan, turn up the heat to med high, and add more olive oil.

Add chicken livers and thyme (I really should have dried the livers thoroughly before dropping them in the pan. I didn’t, and they steamed instead of frying. Oops). Cook the livers in one layer until they are colored, but still pink in the middle. This is the absolute key – overcooked livers are tough, grainy and chewy. Don’t overcook! I kept poking mine with a knife to see what they look like inside. You don’t want them to be bloody, but never grey.

Pour in the brandy and cook off the alcohol. You can simply wait for the alcohol to burn off, or decide to be a badass and set the pan on fire with a lighter. That was a fun column of flames all the way to the ceiling, tell you what.

Sautee livers with brandy for a minute. Take off the heat and add to a food processor with the onions and garlic. I left all the liquid behind in the pan so as not to thin out the pate.

Puree until smooth, then add the rest of the butter. Season with salt and pepper. Divide into ramekins.

Push through a sieve – once if you’re sane, twice if you’re bored.

Fry sage leaves in olive oil and drain on a paper towel. Place leaves over the pate in whatever artistic fashion strikes your fancy. Pour clarified butter over the top to seal. Let cool in fridge for at least an hour.

Serve with toasted bread and good red wine.

A Spectacle

I am having a tough time deciding which view is more beautiful. Is it the view of Boston Harbor’s outer islands, as seen from the top of Spectacle Island...


...or is it the view of a fully loaded grill, stacked with potatoes, marinated skirt steak and chicken breast, and an odd pork sausage or two?


I just don’t know. I can’t decide.

The beginning of every grilling season marks the beginning of sailing season for me. each one is a thing of beauty on its own, certainly, but combine the two and you have the foundation of the most perfect day possible.

Here is how that perfect day goes: Sail to an uninhabited island. Marinate meats in sealed bags on the sunny deck of a rocking sailboat. Breathe in the salty air, smear on the sunscreen, chug Coronas one after another, and feel like a total badass for sailing to an ISLAND for a cookout.

Start the prep work on the boat, so that when you alight on land, all you have to do is start up the grill, pop open more beer, and toss the food on the flames. Make the best grill-top potatoes you will ever have (thanks for the idea, Melissa!) - Make vertical slits in a medium sized baking potato, bring careful not to slice all the way to the bottom. Stuff thin slices of onion in the slits, toss some slices on top. Salt and pepper generously, top with a hefty slice of butter (1/2 tbsp should be fine), wrap tightly in foil and drop onto a hot grill. Flip a couple of times and check to see if they are done (by seeing if a knife passes through the potato easily) after about 20 minutes. The onions melt into the potato almost as if they were never there. The bottom of the potato becomes caramelized and crisp, the rest steams to a perfect flaky doneness.


Oh and the corn. Repeatedly slather freshly shucked corn with salted butter while on the grill, keep it on till it’s charred black all over, and it will turn out so sweet and so perfect.


Toast crusty bread with butter till crisp, grill the sausages, cook the skirt steak minimally, just still done on both sides (leaving it medium-done on the inside), grill the chicken, and have the best cookout/pig-out, eat till it hurts. And to make the Coronas a little more special? Squeeze in lime juice, a heavy shot of hot sauce (not Tabasco, though! It’s too vinegary for this), a pinch of salt, and enjoy an instant Michelada. Awesome.

We did all those things. After we had about a six-pack of beer and three tons of food per person, we went on a walk around Spectacle Island, and sat in a gazebo on one of the highest points. It may have been all the beer or the good food or the perfect weather and lovely company, but that day, that moment, summer began for me and so many worries of the last months and years began to fade. Looks like there is life after grad school.

View from the Spectacle Island pier, where we set up the gas grill the park ranger provided (for a modest fee, including docking our boat).


Marinated* skirt steak
count on ½ pound of skirt steak per person

Place steaks in a zip lock back with:
- juice of a couple limes
- handfuls (proportions of each don’t really matter) of green onion, sage, marjoram, cilantro, or whatever other herbs you happen to have on hand
- a finely chopped fresh jalapeno
- a handful of thinly-sliced white onion
- red pepper flakes
- salt and pepper
- a glug of light-colored beer if there is not enough liquid to carry all the flavors into the meat

1) Marinate at room temperature for a couple of hours, or until you are a) too hungry to wait any longer or b) have reached the island of your choice.
2) Grill until deep grill marks appear on both sides, remove to a plate. Skirt steak is thin and really easy to overcook, so try your hardest not to. Unless you like your meat well-done… in which case I really don’t understand you.


* The same exact marinade worked wonderfully for chicken, making really tender and almost creamy chicken, with a hint of lime and herbage.

It's Over. It's Finally Over.

So… I am done. That’s it. I am now Dr. Anna, for whatever that is worth. Not a lot, really, but it’s still something. Now I have to re-write my blog profile blurb and I have no idea what to say. Before, I was a long-suffering grad student, trying to take the edge off a painful schooling experience by eating wonderful things. Now, I am just a person who eats a lot. I am in need of a new niche. If y’all come up with something, let me know. I am feeling dramatically unspecial right now. Boohoo me, right? Not really. I am also immensely relieved and excited to move on, and to get back all the sleep I lost and re-grow all the hair I pulled out in the last two months of dissertation writing and defending. That might take a while though.

One thing that I knew for sure all along is that I would not have made it this far or anywhere at all without the help (and tolerance) of my friends. They came out in force to keep me sane and keep me fed throughout the entire process. One evening, my friend Melissa brought her kitchen to mine. She came over with her favorite Dutch oven, pre-measured ingredients, and a recipe for chicken goulash with sour cream biscuits (from Bon Appetit? Gourmet? Don’t recall. I don’t remember a lot of things from the last month). I tried to help her with making dinner, but have a serious suspicion that I was in her way more than anything else. Turns out I am useless with a pasty cutter and even worse at handling raw chicken. Luckily, I am an excellent eater. No complaints from anyone on that end.

The goulash was a thing of beauty.

Chicken Goulash with Sour Cream Biscuits
2 lbs skinless boneless chicken thighs, cut into 2 inch pieces
1 ½ cups flour
5 tbsp cold unsalted butter
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tsp baking powder
2 ½ cups chicken stock
1 cup sour cream
1 large onion, finely chopped
1 red bell pepper
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 tbsp hot Hungarian paprika
2/4 tsp caraway seeds
1 tsp thyme

- Preheat oven 425F
- Dust chicken with flour
- Melt 1 tbsp butter and olive oil in Dutch oven. Brown chicken on all sides and remove to plate. (may want to add a little bit more flour at this point if you like a thicker stew)

Meanwhile, make biscuits:
- Pulse flour, baking powder, ¼ tsp salt and ¼ tsp pepper in a food processor. Add 4 tbsp cold butter and pulse.
- Whisk ½ cup chicken stock with ½ cup sour cream and add to flour mixture. Pulse until dough forms. Form into 10-12 round biscuits.

- Saute vegetables in Dutch oven until softened, scraping up chicken bits.
- Return chicken to the pot add spices and toast for a couple of minutes.
- Add remaining of chicken broth and sour cream.
- Place biscuits on top of stew.

Into the oven

- Bake for 20 minutes covered. Remove cover and broil for 2 more minutes to brown the biscuit tops.

Melissa’s recipe substitutions and notes – Melissa used white breast meat instead of thigh meat to cut down on the fattiness of the dish (much appreciated) and half regular paprika and half hot paprika to moderate the heat. It was still seriously hot, mind you, and I am not a spice wuss. One final recipe note – make double the number of biscuits. Seriously. They were so good I wanted to hug them. A little tangy from the sour cream and so smooth and creamy. They were perfect with the hot and spicy stew beneath. Oh, and the next day, the flavors in the stew meld together and the liquid soaks up into the biscuits to make bready flavor bombs. Ridiculously good.



If you don’t have a friend like Melissa, I suggest you go find one immediately. It will be worth your while. It was mine.

Like Butter on Crack

My dissertation has been turned in! I can hardly believe it. It has been hanging over my head inconspicuously for seven years and aggressively for two months, and now it is done. The word relief doesn’t seem to do my present state justice.

I now have some time to describe my diet of the last two months. In a word: eww. Picture everything and anything that is not nailed down in one’s pantry or refrigerator. Picture those food stuffs consumed in no particular order or ritual, just for the sake of being consumed with the hope of keeping my meager attention span tuned to my work for just another little while longer. Yes, I have eaten everything in my house. I can’t say I enjoyed it because frankly, I can’t remember it. It was like sleep eating. One thing does stand out from this past month of bleary-eyed dissertation hell. It takes a bit of a story to explain fully, so here goes.

I ran away to the Tavern with the supervisor one evening to get a break from the soul-numbing dissertation writing and to get out of the house. Here is what I learned that evening – three drinks in one night are ok, but not if they are red wine, vodka on the rocks, and beer, in that order. That was not smart. It might also explain how we (ok, I) wound up picking up a stray French cook at the bar and bringing him home with the promise of good foie gras. I don’t know how it happened, so don’t ask, although it's fair to assume that it had something to do with my ill-advised booze trifecta.

That's whole duck liver, for the non-Francophiles. The ingredient list is brilliant - Foie, booze, salt and pepper. I don't know what else one needs for complete contentment.

If I ever get a tattoo, it will be of that little duck, somewhere private and personal. Because that's how I feel about foie gras.

And the foie gras? It has been teasing me from the back of my fridge with its yellow duck fat and crack cocaine-like addictive contents. I have had it stashed for over a year - my parents brought it back from Paris for me. So to make a long and boring story short, we brought the stray Frenchman home and had drunken foie gras at three in the morning. We huddled around my kitchen counter because the rest of my house was covered in an even layer of dirty mugs and papers papers papers, eating big chunks of foie on toasted bread with olives and salty roasted fingerling potatoes and cold beer. It was perfect, drunken, and decadent. The foie was unctuous and melty, supported by the crunch of the bread. Like a pale beige butter with a slightly animal quality to it. I could have easily finished the entire jar by myself. Luckily, I was too drunk to stay up long enough to accomplish that not-at-all-challenging feat.

Yes, I have been living in grad student dissertation squalor for the last month. It wasn't pretty. Didn't smell that great either.

And when all the foie is gone, the yellow duck fat will remain, to make for amazing meals of eggs and potatoes fried in duck fat. Browned mushrooms sauteed with duck fat and thyme. Toasted bread smeared with duck fat. Oh yes. Duck fat = crack.

Mmmmm... duck fat. Drool.

Chips and salsa after a long night out? I don’t think so.


I really hope I manage to con the Frenchman into cooking for me someday soon. He is suspiciously (perhaps, wisely) not replying to my emails...

Going Underground

I started school in the 5th grade when I came to the States. I was never the cool kid. This may be an understatement. Where do I even start… I had a perm (why lord, why), braces, glasses, and absolutely no idea of what kids are supposed to wear. Oh yes, there was also that pesky Russian accent and difficulty understanding humor, sarcasm, and idioms.

I came a relatively long way in a few years. I lost the accent, outlived the braces, grew out the perm, got contacts… things were looking up. I figured out that shopping only at thrift stores made me interesting and alternateen (it also irritated my mother to no end, unfortunately) and that being funny and sarcastic was way easier than being open and nice. I mastered sarcasm, bleached hair, and torn jeans. By the time I was ready to graduate high school I was voted most sarcastic in my class, infuriating my poor mother once again.

It was around this time that I thoroughly stopped caring about whether or not people considered me cool. It helped that there weren’t really cool kids in my school. We were all dorks in equal measure. There were kids who thought they were cool, but mostly they were just drunk and slutty and no one cared about them.

I am now ten years out of high school (and trying not to hyperventilate). There is no longer such a thing as cool kids. We are all on an even playing field, no one is better or worse (although some have clear asshole tendencies). Except me. I am cool, now more than ever. Why? My friend Maiya and I raided the food underground, an emerging species of restaurant - a supper club run by fellow (but far superior) food bloggers out of their own home.

Love and Butter has the air of a speakeasy, full of secrecy and quiet planning. The weekly menu is posted online, inspired by what’s in season, locally grown, or simply great to eat. The address is sent out shortly before the dinner, the attendants are limited to 6-8, you bring your own booze, sit with strangers and eat really good food made with copious amounts of attention, care, and time. They make the food just for you, taking as much time as it requires. The monetary compensation asked for is absurd. I don’t see how it could even cover the cost of the high quality ingredients used to prepare the meal. The supper club cannot possibly be for profit. It has to be for the love of food. And that, people, is cool.

Maiya and I attended the first lunch put on by the wonderful L&B folks. We sat on the patio on the most beautiful Boston day is recent memory – perfect mid 70s, blue sky, tons of sunshine and trees for shade. Everything was so well thought out, treated with much respect and care. Fresh dense bread and butter waited on the table, along with fresh zucchini heavily salted and spiced with cumin and other things I could not identify.

Shredded radicchio with white beans - bitter, slightly sour, the beans were little soft packets infused with herb and stock flavor; melted leeks in a mustard vinaigrette. It's too bad there were people watching me - I could have eaten all the sweet, soft leeks on the table.



Chicken is boring, boring and ordinary. Love and Butter chicken, however, was most memorable - with herbs and garlic stuffed under the crispy skin, it was some of the most moist chicken I have ever had (brined before roasting? Forgot to ask). Served with a salad of supremely fresh mixed greens with large crystals of salt and linguine dressed with chicken juice. [Never thought that would sound appetizing. Chicken juice…]


Spot of dessert – deep fried ripe peaches with marjoram.

Mead sorbet (sounds remarkably like MEAT sorbet when said aloud – even I didn’t think that sounded good), and addictive, crispy butter cookies that were more butter than cookie (picture at head of post).

Next time (oh there will be a next time) I hope to bother the hosts a little more, get to ask more questions, figure out why they do what they do and how they see it evolving. Right now I am just happy knowing something others do not – I have a way into the food underground, where all the cool kids hang out.


P.S. I pleaded to be let into the kitchen to help out whenever they needed a hand. Somehow, I don't think I am cool enough. It's never going to happen.

Celebrating Boxes

Since it looks like I have celebrated myself out of yet another night of sleep, I may as well fess up. I have been doing some heavy celebrating (read: drinking). I have waited for this for six long years and now I get to celebrate. The reason for my newly acquired perma-hangover? Box checking. Yep. I got my box checked.

Snicker away, I’ll wait…. Done? Ok.

At my school, to getting one’s box checked means, among other things, receiving an actual check in an actual little box on a form that says that the student may begin writing his or her dissertation. This means that... drumroll please! I am going to graduate as early as this fall, depending on when I manage to stop drinking, finish whatever experiments I have left, and begin writing. So that’s my news! In another month I will likely begin writing full time, leaving way more opportunity for eating, cooking, and writing about eating and cooking, which I am absolutely thrilled about. That, and getting a PhD ain’t so bad either. (as a future PhD I feel it acceptable to use ain’t… hope they can’t strip my title from me).

The most recent form of celebration was kindly thrown my Melissa, who grilled on her porch (hot commodity, that, in Boston – not only a porch, but one with a grill on it. Grills are illegal most everywhere). Melissa made the most unbelievable southwest marinated chicken breast – after marinating for an entire day, it was just about the most tender and moist chicken breast imaginablet. There was also plain old grilled chicken breast, doused in a barbeque sauce I have been meaning to try for over a year. It may be the best barbeque sauce I have had to date – it was thin, vinegary, spicy, and not at all sweet. I need to find other uses for the gallon of it I now have sitting in my fridge. Suggestions? I have no grill, illegal or otherwise.

Melissa also made grilled asparagus dressed with an herby vinaigrette and the most genius baked potato I have ever had. This put all other baked potatoes to shame (I hope they are hanging their heads low as I type this). The potato was sliced and layered with onions, pepper, salt, and butter, wrapped in foil and plopped on the grill. The potato steamed till it was done but the best part… oh the best part was on the bottom, where the potato got a really crisp and chewy crust. I may be ruined for all other baked potatoes forever.

Thank you, Melissa!

I should also mention that this celebration involved copious amounts of wine. I don’t feel so good. Again. I have given myself the rest of the weekend to bop around, but then it’s back to lab… for a little while longer.




P.S. I expound on the box checking experience in greater detail here, if anyone is interested.

Off The Topic

I had it all planned out. I knew exactly the post I wanted write and how I would set it up. I was going to call it something completely corny, like “A Tale Of Two Chickens,” and would once again go into how I am a kitchen experimenter and like to compare two different preparations of the same thing (dork, I know). I was full of the drive and determination that can only come from a well-laid plan.

I cooked chicken breasts coated with breadcrumbs and parmesan, both in my favorite cast iron skillet and in the oven, to see which I prefer. So far so good. I then sat down to dinner with a piece of each preparation of chicken.

That's the oven-baked chicken on the right and skillet chicken on the left. Oven chicken won by a narrow margin.


This is when I got sidetracked. Problem was that the chicken was painfully unremarkable (and, therefore, un-bloggable) in both cases. My innocuous and unoriginal steamed sweet potato on the other hand, was quite noteworthy.

It wasn’t the potato itself that led to my derailment from the chicken plan – it was the salt I doused the potato with. An ardent supporter of Sunday Night Dinner, (and wonderful friend) Jonathan, had been kind enough to send me a jar of Himalayan Pink salt, for no reason at all (that I can remember). I had the jar stashed away in my spice jungle until a recent shopping binge led me to buy a salt grinder.

I coarsely ground some pink salt on my potato, topped it with some olive oil and black pepper and changed my blogging plans with one bite. Wow. I found that the pink salt isn’t really very salty – it is very mild, both in salt content and flavor, which allows it to be left in larger chunks. The coarse pink salt added crunch to the smooth (and super sweet - thanks Boston Organics!) potato along with a soft, un-intrusive salty taste. That’s the only way I can describe the taste of the salt – soft and smooth, just like it’s pink color.

The contrast between mineral-rich salt like this one and the common Morton’s salt is striking. The stuff in the cylindrical paper containers tastes bitter and acidic to me. Chemical, even. For delicate applications that can allow the salt to shine through, such as grinding salt on top of a salad or something simple like a potato, this stuff can’t be beat. It’s a condiment more than a spice. I could almost eat the crystals like hard candy. That’s probably not a good idea, right?

Just goes to show you, even the best-laid plans… Eh. “Tale of Two Chickens” was a lame title anyway.







P.S. As an update, I have already managed to break the salt grinder. I don't know how.

The Neglected Bird

Do people eat goose (geese?) around Christmas? I have a vague notion that they do or did at some point in time. Being the good Jewish women that we are, my Mom and I cooked a goose this Christmas day, just to say we did. It was an experience.

Let me preface by saying that I now know enough to stay away from cooking whole birds. This year’s Thanksgiving turkey experience is likely to stay with me for years - anything larger than a chicken now paralyzes me with fear. When I say that my Mom and I cooked a goose, I mean that she let me chop things while she cooked a goose. I am an excellent chopper.

I had never seen a goose wrapped in plastic before and, therefore, feel the need to describe it. Ours resembled a small, elongated turkey. Its body was long, its wings were long, its neck (stuffed where it wouldn’t reach under normal circumstances) was long. I found the sight of the long wings somewhat disquieting but I am not sure why. Perhaps they were too arm-like for my comfort. The breast of the goose seemed atrophied as compared to a turkey - there was not a lot of meat there.


The key thing about geese is this – they are basically bags of fat. This wasn’t even one of them force-fed geese that are now inaccessible to Chicago’s dining community (I will have to leave Boston if they ever ban foie gras here. I am not kidding). Ours was a farm-raised, free range, organic, hippie, happy goose and it was still a bag of fat. I know, I know – fat is flavor, but wow. Trimming the bird took a bit of time. (Please note that I abstained from posting a picture of a pile of goose fat. Said picture can be produced upon request).

We followed Emeril’s recipe for roasting the goose. His approach involves the thoroughly gruesome step of poking holes all over the bird to allow rendering fat to escape during cooking and dousing the goose with boiling water every half hour to help that fat render. And render it did. There was goose fat all over the oven door, on the floor by the oven, and hanging in the kitchen air. There must have been an inch of fat at the bottom of the roasting pan. After the cooking was done I felt as though I was covered in a thin layer of goose fat. I smelled goose everywhere I turned for a day following.

So how did it taste? Like a cross between a turkey and a duck - not as gamey as duck but more flavorful that turkey. It was dark meat all over like a duck, more fatty (for discussion, see above), and more chewy. The breast meat was great – juicy, tender, and flavorful. The rest of the bird, however – the legs and all other accessory parts – were rather tough and not very pleasant to eat, although the wonderful mild duck flavor was still there.

We were surprised to find that our 12 pound goose really only fed three people. That’s a lot of inedible goose! The ever-wise they say that a four pound chicken can feed four people while a four pound duck can feed just two. I would say that a four pound goose, if such a thing existed, would feed only one.

Ever seen goose on a restaurant menu? I haven’t, not once. Maybe it’s not economically sound to offer goose when only a fourth of it (breast meat) is desirable. It does seem odd for the restaurant industry to neglect an entire species of farmed bird, though it does explain why the high schoolers at the Whole Foods checkout counter didn’t know that people eat geese.

At the end of the night, with the goose experience behind us, my Mom decided that she doesn’t like goose and I decided that I need a shower to wash that goose off. I think that the tougher texture and more delicate flavor of goose is better suited to slower cooking methods as opposed to roasting. Goose confit would be fantastic, especially since the fat can be removed once the confit is chilled. Food (goose) for thought.


Update: I asked an actual chef why actual restaurants don't serve goose. This was Chef Josh's response : "Because it's a pain in the ass." Concise and to the point. I couldn't have said it better myself.