It was a day for staying indoors, so I was a bit surprised when our neighbor pulled up in his pickup and lugged a black trash bag out of the back. I had no idea what he was doing. But Spencer remembered:
"A goose! He brought us a goose!"
Sure enough, the next moment he reached into the sack, and pulled out a Canadian goose, freshly killed. He held it up by the neck, and the body just swung back and forth there beneath it. Gross.
It's goose season. He'd been hunting, and had remembered Vlad's request to bring us one. "You want it?" I could not honestly say I did. I was already trying to stay as far away as possible without looking rude.
"Um…" I said, "Well, I don't know how to clean it." It was a dead bird, feathers, eyes, and all.
He told me how to skin the thing. Double gross.
"Sure, we'll take it! Thanks very much!" I was trying to sound pleasant, even though I sort of wanted to throw up. I left the bird in the garbage sack on the lawn mower seat in the garage. Vlad could clean it when he got home. I wasn't going to touch that carcass.
Vlad didn't exactly relish the idea himself. We're not exactly hunting folk, nor survivalists. We don't do dead animals that still have bullets in them somewhere, and feathers and hides that still have to be cleaned off. But he bravely looked up "how to skin a goose" on YouTube and watched the video. Then he set to work in the garage. The boys were in the height of their glory. Claire was there with them, not about to be outdone with enthusiasm level, even though she wasn't sure what to make of it. I kept Katya inside.
10 minutes later the goose was skinned and ready to be washed. Now it resembled a big, dark skinless chicken. I had watched another video on YouTube, and insisted that we had to soak the thing in salt water overnight to get rid of extra blood and draw out the shot. So we did. I hoped what I read was right. The goose was kind of grossing me out, and I didn't want to mess with it any more than necessary.
This morning we put the goose in the crock pot with lots of butter, garlic, and herbs. It cooked all day. This evening we returned home from the movies to find that it was cooked, tender and flavorful. It smelled good, but I was sure it was going to taste nasty. I tried to calm myself by telling myself that people have been eating geese for thousands of years. Try as I might, whenever I said that in my mind, it always came along with a picture of Tiny Tim.
I carefully tried the smallest taste that Vlad first offered. To my utter surprise, it was delicious! And my family agreed! After their first careful and tiny mouthfuls for taste tests, they fell on it like a bunch of ravenous wolves. I would have taken a picture of the goose all beautiful and herby, but the family gathered around the crock pot with a forks in hand, and in about 10 minutes the carcass was picked clean enough that it didn't retain any of it's former culinary glory. So I took a picture of the feasting scene instead.
Now let's see if the pumpkin pie makes it all the way to Canadian Thanksgiving. (That's tomorrow, y'all!)
