Thanks, everybody, for helping me make an awesome family meal. I've always wanted to make a goose, but was told it was too fat and I may not. Then I got a phone call giving me permission to make one on Christmas Day. Lindac give me some great guidelines, and many others gave me hints and suggestions. Jamie Oliver gave me the spice rub recipe. It's sort of like chinese five spice on steroids. His recipe has you make a bucket of it to have most over for later. No. I did a third of the recipe (except the cloves , which I forgot to reduce, but I figured it would be fine this time of year, and I didn't notice in the end. Though I love cloves), putting a few ingredients at once together through my spice grinder. JO's version may be for using a full sized FP. It was great. It smelled great cooking. It tasted good cooked. It only lightly scented the meat, but the goose was really good. The only issue was that it seems to have been a transitional goose. All the recipes talked about a 12 pound bird for ten people. We had 7 fairly light eaters and it was just enough, though there's plenty left to pick from the carcass.

Because waterfowl are so fatty, I kept trying to make the accompaniments more on the lean size, but the menu ran away to fat-and-sugar land, and I gave up. For condiments, there was red wine reduction, which took a long time to come together, but finally transformed from tasting like chicken (stock), though a bitter phase, to that deep rich berry flavor that's so good. I stopped reducing there because I didn't want to risk the flavor, so it was thinner, like a light gravy, rather than syrupy, but it also soaked into the meat well. There were also pear-applesauce (chunky pears cooked down in apple cider) and a parsnip puree that has more butter and cream than my old recipe, which I couldn't find, but with garlic as well. It doesn't taste garlicky, it just tastes parsnipy with an extra helping of deliciousness and an overall feeling of lusciousness.

I was having trouble figuring out how to get the mandatory potatoes to work out the way I was cooking the bird, but everyone said they had to cook in the goose fat, so I just roasted them the way I generally do. Variety of fingerling and somewhat bigger (but not full sized) potatoes, rainbow carrots, pearl onions and tiny radishes the size of pearl onions, rolled in a bowl with S&P, Italian herb blend, and another herb mix they had, and goose fat drained out of the pot instead of olive oil, roasted until somewhat charred.

Salad was baby spinach and wild arugula with variety bites sized tomatoes, cucumber, orange bell pepper and avocado, with an acidic herb vinaigrette.

Back to rich: the real stars, aside from the goose were Chloebud's Bon Apetit blue cheese shortbread (served plain, not with the cheese and chutney roulade) and Martha Scott's pumpkin cobbler.

Notes: I used Point Reyes blue cheese, which is creamier than crumblier, and my piece was just over the measure probably with less air than from crumbly cheese. It's a bit richer and a bit less harsh a flavor than most. Sort of halfway toward roquefort. My butter was just under the measure so the cheese made up for it. Also, my walnuts, which were okay the other day, had started to turn, so I used pecans. The blue cheese flavor is very present, but they're SO good! and while rich, they don't have that heaviness that sometimes comes with short.\

I was going to use canned pumpkin for the cobbler, as per directions, but my can was way old, and my other can should have been tossed years ago. And I had a lovely little pie pumpkin that needed using. I just eyeballed the quantity which was closed enough in volume to be about the same as the can. The pumpkin was really sweet, so I used 3/4 of the sugar and about half the salt, to please our palates. It was divine! Served hot from the oven, with commercial but good vanilla ice cream (Three Twins).

Butter, cream and goose fat ruled the day, but everyone enjoyed it and there was a lot of all-gone-ing.

Thank-you to the whole forum for your friendship, enthusiasm, encouragement and recipes!