勝美2

The Friday Five for May 15th. Thank you!

1. Do you like to barbecue or grill or does that duty fall to someone else?

Myrtie The Wonder Cat is too young to be a pyro. That leaves me.

2. What is your favorite thing to throw on the grill?

Turkey. For Super Bowl. I shovel a path through the snow to the grill.

3. Do you have a new/newer grill or an old standby?

Old Fireball came free with my house! Such a deal. Was a sleek Weber grill back in the nineteen fifties; became a mottled grey and rust. And she was a little wobbly from when I backed over her with the minivan and had to weld the leg support back on.

4. Have you ever owned a hibachi?

In Mother Japan hibachi own you!

I own several hibachi and use official Japanese white binchotan charcoal. At one of my summer parties I serve yakiniku-style. Which is Japanese for "cook your own damn food."

5. Any good barbecue stories?

The Goose / Spit Story.

A few times a year I hop in the roadster and head for Shawano in northern Wisconsin to buy soda water made with pure cane sugar in glass bottles. On the way back home, I stop in Waushara to visit friends and to shop at the Bent And Dent, a distressed grocery business on an Amish farm. The farmer buys truckloads of almost-at-expiration-date and weird stuff for pennies on the dollar. I've gotten some really good deals there and found some interesting things. A jar of lime cherries was 15¢. They are just like maraschino cherries except limey and fluorescent lime-colored. Nicorette nicotine gum, which retails for aprx $40, was 15¢. It didn't matter if it was the 2mg or the 4mg kind and I don't think the farmer knows the difference. Come to think of it, a lot of the items were 15¢. I think I would have gone with a quarter to make the math easy but it's not my store.

The store is lit by pressurized kerosene lamps on late autumn afternoons. Not the quaint, homey kerosene lamps. Pressurized. As in arc welding. Brighter than the sun. The only electricity on the farm is for the cash register to comply with state tax laws. If I walked in there and saw canned monkey brains on the shelves I wouldn't be surprised.

The farmer's daughter was working that day. She wears a faded navy-blue bonnet kind of like the girl's on the raisin box with just the ends of the ribbons tied. I think that means she is single. Seriously. It is very likely I am the first person of color she met in real life. I know she has seen a picture of a black woman because the store had Sylvia Of Harlem's canned collard greens with Sylvia's beaming countenance on the label. 15¢. And the daughter offered to help put things in my car; she seemed curious about the roadster.

In addition to distressed groceries, fresh poultry is available. On one particular trip I skipped the soda water and had a iced cooler ready in the trunk. I bought a goose. From the barn, there was a big commotion and squawking and then silence, it was another half hour while she dressed the goose. I should have gone to the farm early in the morning to place my order and returned in the afternoon.

I encountered problems grilling the goose. I was not prepared for the over three quarts of grease. Running in the house and down to the basement for another canning jar so the grease wouldn't flow onto the driveway. No wonder pioneers used goose grease for everything. The fire flared up constantly. My squirt gun couldn't keep up. Had to get the supersoaker. Because of the weight and size of the goose, it was difficult to manuever and no clearance for the grill cover. Although the goose reached the proper temperature, the skin was not crispy and the texture of the meat was somewhat dense and rubbery. It sure didn't taste like chicken. The other issue was that the leftovers had to be reheated. I couldn't use the goose as readily as turkey or duck. It was disappointing.

Fast forward to the following year / next goose. Despite having the semi-retired Old Fireball and my big sister's hand-me-down propane grill, I use my portable firepit thingy for high-volume cooking (booyah, roasted corn-on-the-cob, etc.). And there is the added benefit of the smell of a wood fire. You can put charcoal in there, too. I live in the city so open fires aren't a good idea. I'm probably getting away with murder. Or arson.

I improvised a rudimentary manually-operated spit out of rebar that I threaded through the mesh sides of the firepit. I didn't realize that there had to be tines involved to hold the goose in place relative to the axis of the shaft of the spit so the whole 'assembly' would rotate and removing the meat and the spit from the mesh with a hot fire going took a lot of monkey business so it didn't work out very well. And you had to sit there and turn the thing.

I recently came across the Grizzly Spit. It operates on two 'D'-size batteries and has a load capacity of twenty-four pounds which would just about max out on a goose or a turkey. But it doesn't look very substantial. I think I would be worried about melting the thing.

So so so. What I learned:

1. Too high of a temperature.
2. Didn't prick the skin. (I wonder if some of the grease saturated the meat internally and caused the taste. It wasn't unpleasant but it wasn't really good, either.)
3. I did not save the grease. A little sardine can-sized grease catcher came with the grill. I removed that and positioned a quart-sized canning jar underneath. I ended up having to run in the house and get another jar and then another so we know there were three quarts. (There may have been a little spillage, too.)
4. Even though I am cooking outdoors I will use one of those disposable aluminum roasting pans and crumple up a 'snake' of aluminum foil in lieu of a roasting rack for the goose to sit on and use a baster to save the grease. And have multiple canning jars ready.
5. Skip the spit idea. At least as far as goose is concerned.

At one point I was going to turn on the hose because of the flare-ups but you know how you're not supposed to drink from a garden hose because of bacteria? With charcoal you just squirt at the flames with your squirt gun and everything is okay. It sounds weird to use a roasting pan on an outdoor grill but if you think about it, it's pretty smart. Very smart, actually. And it is good to know that goose can be eaten cold if I am successful.

When I am successful.