I may have just ordered a goose for my Christmas dinner…
A 12-pounder, to be exact… I do hope I will have some guests for dinner, because otherwise I’ll be eating confit of goose, goose paté, goose rillette and so on for ages to come! Though I suppose worse things could happen…
The goose will, though, be delivered quite dead and without feathers. (Or so I hope!)
In Denmark Christmas is in the evening on the 24th and really begins with the big Christmas dinner. It can be roast duck, roast pork or roast goose. The trimmings are the same: Braised and pickled red cabbage, boiled potatoes, caramelized small potatoes, gravy. And then you can add on as you like with other roast dinner trimmings. I like to do English roast potatoes instead of the boiled potatoes (because they’re SO much better, especially when roasted in goose fat), roasted Brussels sprouts, apple and prune stuffing for the goose, and maybe a waldorf salad.
After the roast comes dessert, which is risalamande, a Danish way of saying the French “riz á l’amande” – rice with almonds – though it has absolutely nothing to do with France. It’s a rice pudding with chopped almonds in it,and one whole almond that earns the winner of the almond a prize. The pudding is served with a warm cherry sauce, and I preserved some sour cherries just for this sauce in autumn after helping my uncle with his cherry harvest. Depending on who my Christmas guests are, the sauce will either be made with the cherries preserved in rum or the cherries preserved in syrup.
You see, I’m not quite sure who my guests will be… I’ve volunteered as a “Christmas host” with the Red Cross, so my guests could be lonely people who don’t have anybody to spend Christmas with, people who can’t afford to celebrate Christmas themselves or for that matter a group from the local refugee camp. (Hence the two options for the cherry sauce; Muslims are welcome at my rather secular Christmas where the star on the tree is really the only religious symbol, and that’s a fairly subtle one.)
I bought a tree last week, actually. It’s a bit smaller than what I got for Christmas in the old Copenhagen apartment, but my ceilings are lower and I still need room for the top star – and a safe distance from the upper-most candles on the tree to the ceiling! I mean, you didn’t expect me to put electric lights on my tree, did you?
It will still be around 7′, though, so not a tiny thing. It’s currently standing in the unheated garden room to keep fresh and will be taken inside in the morning of the 24th and decked out with paper ornaments of various forms – woven hearts, woven stars, woven cones for candy or cookies – and candles. I’ve been looking for nice baubles for a while but just didn’t find any that were my style, but I did find the perfect candle holders, which is more important.
Oh, how I look forward to Christmas… Even if spending Christmas with strangers turns out to be a nightmare I can always just put fresh candles on my tree and celebrate a second Christmas alone, and there’s BOUND to be some left-over goose!
