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.