a German Christmas in Italy

This year we decided to extend our gastronomic experience to preparing goose for Christmas. Previously we had prepared rabbit in a local olive and herb casserole, but this had lost its challenge - it was so easy that we could prepare it from memory now... Given that goose is traditional german fare we had to ensure there was space in the car for the esky, which we had bought in California. Lucky there was space, so we visitied a local Toom supermarket just near Darmstadt to buy a frozen 4.2 kg bio goose. Of course we had to buy the accompanying knoedel(potato dumplings), rotkraut(red cabbage suaerkraut) and the magical herb beifuss.... It felt a little strange carrying german food into Italy, but we had an important experiment to undertake.

There was divided opinion across the internet in both english and german recipes about whether to start cooking the goose at high temperature and then cool it down or to keep it long and low... So in the end we decided to follow the very simple recipe of Hans Haas, preparing the stuffing and keeping it low and slow... To everyone's surprise it was a stunning success - so much goose and so moist and tasty, a great gravy and superb accompaniments. Markus was also very lucky to wear his australian santa apron, thanks to my sister - it looked great and matched our christmas decorations...