Sixth day of Christmas - frozen goose

UPDATE - they're back in stock!

On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me, six geese-a-laying. Alas, the subject of this post's laying days are long gone. This is another post that's based on past-experience, I'm afraid. And I don't even have a photo to go with this one. I was going to try and take a sneaky snap in the freezer aisle, but my local Lidl has already sold out.

Price: £17.99

Score (out of five): 3.5

Review: two years' ago we hosted Christmas with my mum and a friend at ours. I thought I'd go with a Lidl goose as they were selling slowly so I managed to get one, and I don't like turkey. Due to our small fridge, it was impossible to do what Lidl suggest and defrost it in the fridge, so it ended up being sat on the kitchen window sill overnight on a day when the temperature hit 16 degrees. It survived though.

We had goose for Christmas a couple of times when I was growing up - I particularly recall the year of walking into the kitchen to find a guilty-looking cat, a gnawed cold goose joint and little piles of cat sick around the place. It was a bit too rich for the wee thing. 

One thing to note about Goose, generally, is that like most waterfowl, it's all fat, wing and chest cavity. This very much applies to the Lidl goose. If you're feeding four it'll just about stretch. If you're feeding your extended family of twenty, then you'll be starving or eating a lot of sprouts. If you want that sort of goose then you are going to have to go to a butcher and get a much bigger, and more expensive one.

But for £17.99 it was fine. Just enough fat came off it for the roasties. The meat was moist and succulent and it went very well with an apricot stuffing from Sainsbury's. 

Free range chicken

Obviously, this is what it looks like cooked

On the third day of Christmas my true love sent to me three (well one) French (well, British) hen(s)

Price: £3.29 per kilo

Score (out of five): 4

Review: it was with trepidation that I bought my first chicken from Lidl. The Sunday roast is a bit of an event in our household so this could have ruined a week's meals. But I figured at that price I couldn't go too far wrong.

And I have to say, I've always been very impressed indeed. I roast mine with lemon, garlic rosemary and butter for about 1 hour 20 minutes for a four pound bird and it makes a fantastic Sunday roast and leftovers for chicken pie during the week, The flesh is always very moist - I eat a leg with my Sunday lunch and it really is divine. And the skin is always crisp and tasty.

I used to buy my chickens from Tesco and would either go for corn-fed free range, or Finest organic free range, if I was feeling particularly flush. I always find with all Tesco chicken there's an odd rubbery texture to it, it's a bit flavourless and bland. The Lidl chicken could not be more different.

It would get a five-star review, but at the price they sell it at, I do worry slightly about quite how free range the chickens are. Once the bird I bought had one leg decidedly smaller than the other, which did show it had probably been running around a lot, albeit in circles, but did leave me thinking. Please, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, don't do a expose on the atrocious conditions in a Lidl chicken farm. I really like them.

Shame Lidl don't stock fresh rosemary. Whenever I do this for Sunday lunch I always have to go home via Tesco to get it.

Deluxe Red-legged Patridge

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me a partridge in a pear tree. This is the first of my 12 days of Christmas posts where me and guest bloggers will try and review 12 things that appear in Lidl before Christmas.

Price: £5.99

Score (out of five): 4

Review: well this was one of those random freezer section purchases from Lidl. We'd never eaten partridge before, so it is a bit difficult to do an honest review as I can't compare it to a Scottish partridge that'd been hung in a game butcher for a while.

I also didn't really know how to cook it - I browned off the skin in a casserole dish with some oil and then chucked in some carrot, onion and garlic, and popped the lid on and put it in the oven for 15 minutes then took the lid off to brown it off for the last ten minutes of cooking. Alas this didn't leave it the golden colour on the serving suggestion photo.

But it was very tasty. Very gamey, obviously and remarkably fleshy as well. My general thought was I'd now like to find some good partridge recipes and try again. 

Oh, and I know that the 12 days of Christmas start on Christmas Day and count down the days that it took the Magi to arrive, hence the carol. 

Milton Gate Selection - British 6 Smoked Dry Cure Back Bacon Rashers

Price: £1.99

Score (out of five): 1

Review: we're actually not snobs when it comes to bacon. We make a easy pasta dish with smoked bacon and in our experience bog-standard supermarket smoked bacon is the best as it has a strong flavour.

Alas with this bacon Lidl didn't meet expectations. Even if it were in a bacon roll rather than a pasta dish, it still would!d have been disappointing. It was basically like pinkish pork chops. It really didn't taste like it had been cured at all. It was neither salty nor smokey. Just ridiculously bland. We'll be going back to Tesco in future.

To be fair on Lidl, they did have other smoked back bacon, which could have met our taste requirements, but the smallest pack I could buy was 28 rashers (two packs of 14) which was just far too much, even though we do have a freezer.