Re: Goose
Yorkshire puds a yes from me. Never had them with christmas dinner growing up, but as far as I'm concerned no roast dinner is complete without them. One of the things my (non-british) missus loves most about the UK is roast dinners (and one's we've rustled up for her folks go like a house on fire) so christmas is a great excuse to spend half the day in a kitchen pushing out the gravy boat (assuming you like cooking of course).
Starter tends to be about three hours before the main meal and is mostly just something light to stop you getting hammered from the first round of wine. Smoked salmon on toast, some pastry tartlets, smoked mackerel paté on crackers, mushroom arancini went down very well last year, that sort of thing. Couple of glasses of champagne or prosecco to line the stomach and protect from the rest of the wine that's consumed whilst finishing off the main course.
Goose is a great choice, although in my household we tend to alternate with different meat or game over the years (never been much of a fan of turkey). We're lucky enough to have an excellent butcher so this year we're having partridges, last year we had a brace of pheasants, the year before that we had grouse. Then a good few litres of a homemade gravy suited to the meat (white wine or madeira with chicken stock for most poultry, red wine with juice from the meat for most game, often with redcurrant jelly and crushed juniper). Cover it in bacon, pack the roasting tin with quartered onions, chipolatas, bacon/stuffing rolls, pigs in blankets as per preference. When the meat is done and out of the oven, the roasting tin is de-glazed and then added to the gravy, then the batter for the yorkshire (usually with a generous spoonful of bicarb to help fluff it up and get the top/edges nice and crispy) is poured into the roasting tin and cooked in the 15-20mins whilst the meat sits. Some extra fat will be added if the meat didn't leave much in the way of juices.
We'll generally do a roast beef joint in the preceding week to get fresh beef dripping for the roast veg (unless of course we're cooking goose or duck).
About five hours later we manage to have some christmas pud (the fruit for which has usually been macerating in rum and spices for the past four months).
Any leftovers veg are turned into boxing day bubble'n'squeak, leftover meat is typically recycled into a meat/game pie (we make a sort of hybrid shortcrust/suet crust pastry for this) with any leftover gravy.
In a word: yum.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
